How AI assistants decide which businesses to mention
An assistant answering "which company in Dubai can build our app?" does not invent its list. It runs searches, reads the pages it finds and picks the sources it trusts most. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google's index, while ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers, including Bing.
That means three things decide whether you are mentioned: whether your pages are in those indexes, whether they answer the question more clearly than other pages, and whether other sites, such as directories, reviews and "top companies" lists, confirm that you exist and do the work. Most businesses we check have a gap in at least one of the three.
What Google says about ranking in AI Overviews
Google's guidance for site owners says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page must be indexed and eligible for a normal snippet, and the usual SEO practices apply. Structured data helps only when it matches what is visible on the page.
So for Google, GEO is good SEO done thoroughly. The difference is in the other assistants, which lean more on Bing, on third-party mentions and on pages that state facts plainly. A Princeton-led study of generative engines, published in 2023, found that adding statistics, quotations and cited sources to a page raised its visibility in AI answers by up to 40% in their tests.
What an AI visibility audit covers
The audit gives you a baseline you can measure against later, and a fix list in order of impact:
- The agreed questions asked in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google, in Arabic and English, with every business and source named in each answer recorded.
- Indexing in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for the pages that should answer those questions.
- robots.txt, CDN and firewall settings for AI crawlers, and whether pages render without JavaScript.
- Your name, address and phone number across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories such as Clutch and GoodFirms.
- Organization and Service structured data, including the legal name and the sameAs links to your profiles.
- The pages your competitors are cited for, and what they contain that yours do not.
Why Arabic is the quicker win
There are far fewer good Arabic pages on most business topics than English ones. On arksoft.ae, our own Search Console data from October 2026 shows our Arabic guides ranking higher than the English versions of the same guides, for example position 8 against position 24 for the UAE e-invoicing guide.
Assistants answer Arabic questions from Arabic sources when good ones exist, and fall back to English pages when they do not. A business with clear Arabic pages on its services, prices and process has less competition for those answers than it does in English.
Regulated sectors: law firms, clinics and accounting firms
In these sectors an AI answer can repeat a claim from your website to thousands of people, so the content has to be right as well as visible:
- Clinics in Dubai follow the Dubai Health Authority advertising rules, which restrict claims about results, before-and-after images and testimonials.
- Law firms face professional conduct rules on advertising, so pages describe practice areas and procedures rather than promising outcomes.
- Accounting and tax firms are cited when they explain deadlines and rules with the law named and a review date shown, such as corporate tax or e-invoicing.
- In each case we work from your licensing rules and have your team approve every page before it goes live.
What GEO cannot do
Nobody controls what an assistant says. Answers change with the wording of the question, the user's location and history, and model updates, so any promise that ChatGPT will always recommend you is not credible.
What can be measured is how often you appear across a fixed set of questions, month after month, and how many enquiries come from AI assistants. We report both, alongside Google rankings, so you can see whether the work is paying off.
