ChatGPT SEO for UAE businesses: check what ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI say about you, then fix it

More and more buyers in the UAE ask an AI assistant before they search: "which agency in Dubai does X", "is company Y licensed", "who offers Z in Arabic and English". Many pages selling "ChatGPT SEO" describe this as a new discipline with its own tricks. The primary sources describe something much plainer, and most of it you can check yourself without paying anyone.

This article is that check, in five steps: ask the assistants a fixed set of questions, make sure the crawlers behind them are allowed to read your site, make the facts about your company consistent, answer the follow-up questions on your own pages, and measure what actually arrives. Every rule quoted below comes from Google's or OpenAI's own documentation, retrieved in October 2026, so you can read the sentence yourself.

A note before the content: no one controls what an AI assistant says. Answers vary between sessions, users and versions. What you can control is whether the assistant is allowed to read your pages, whether those pages answer the question clearly, and whether the facts about your company agree everywhere they appear.

The short answer

• For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode there is no separate optimisation. Google's page "AI features and your website" (last updated 10 December 2025) says: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." A page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.
• For ChatGPT search, one robots.txt setting decides whether you can be shown at all. OpenAI's crawler documentation names OAI-SearchBot as the crawler "for search". Sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they "can still appear as navigational links".
• Training is a separate decision. GPTBot collects data for OpenAI's models, and OpenAI states that "each setting is independent of the others". You can allow search and refuse training, or the other way round.
• Consistent facts matter more than new files. Google states: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." What helps is the same legal name, licence, services and contact details everywhere.
• You can measure part of it. Google counts AI feature traffic inside the normal Search Console Performance report, and visits from ChatGPT search carry a recognisable source. The rest you sample by hand.

Step 1: ask the assistants a fixed set of questions

Start with what the assistants say today, before you change anything. The point is not a single answer but a repeatable sample you can compare next month.

Write down eight to twelve questions in the wording your buyers would use, in English and, if you serve Arabic speakers, in Arabic. Mix three types:

1. Name questions. "What does [your company name] do?" "Is [your company name] licensed in the UAE?" "Where is [your company name] based?"
2. Category questions. "Which companies in Dubai offer [your service]?" "Who does [your service] in Arabic and English in the UAE?"
3. Decision questions. "What should I check before hiring a [your service] provider in Dubai?" "How much does [your service] cost in the UAE?"

Ask each question in ChatGPT, in Gemini and in Google Search (where an AI Overview may appear above the results). Log every answer in a simple table:

Ask the important questions two or three times. If your company appears once in three runs, that is information too. Treat the result as a sample that shows direction and errors, not as a ranking.

The most useful column is usually the last one. A wrong address, an old service, a licence in the wrong free zone or a trading name that does not match your licence is something you can trace back to a source and correct. Being missing from a category answer is usually a content and authority question that takes longer.

Step 2: check that the crawlers are allowed in

Open https://yourdomain/robots.txt in a browser. Look for these user agents:

Two things go wrong in practice. First, a blanket rule written months ago to "block AI" also blocks OAI-SearchBot, and nobody remembers it. Second, the block is not in robots.txt at all but in a firewall, a CDN bot setting or a security plugin. Google lists "ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure" as a best practice for its AI features, and the same applies to every other crawler.

If you change robots.txt for ChatGPT search, OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours for its systems to adjust. Whether to allow training crawlers is a business decision, not an SEO one, and you can make it separately.

For Google, open Search Console and use URL inspection on your most important pages: the home page, each service page and the contact page. "URL is on Google" is the minimum. A site: search is not a reliable test.

Step 3: make the facts about your company agree

An assistant describes your company from what it can read: your website, your Business Profile, directory entries, social profiles and articles that mention you. When those sources disagree, it may repeat the wrong one. In the UAE, a few disagreements are especially common:

• Legal name versus trading name. The name on your trade licence, often with "L.L.C" or "FZ-LLC", and the brand name you use in marketing. Both are fine, but the website should state the legal name in text, and the profiles should use the same brand name.
• Free zone versus mainland, and which emirate. If your licence is issued in one free zone and you advertise "Dubai", say clearly which authority issued the licence.
• Address. A flexi desk or virtual-office address can be correct on your licence and still be ineligible for a Google Business Profile. Google's rules on this are set out in our article on free-zone addresses and Business Profiles.
• Services that changed. An old service page, an old LinkedIn description or a directory entry from your first year can keep an outdated offer alive.
• Languages. If you serve customers in Arabic, say so on the site, and ideally have Arabic pages with their own URLs. Our Arabic and English website page explains what that means technically.

Write one fact sheet: legal name, trading name, licence number and issuing authority, address as it should be shown, services in one sentence each, emirates and countries you serve, languages, phone, WhatsApp and email. Then go through every place in your Step 1 table where a wrong fact came from and correct it at the source.

On your own site, put these facts in visible text (about page, footer, contact page) and, if you use structured data such as Organization schema, make sure it says exactly the same. Google lists "making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page" as a best practice and states that no special schema is needed for its AI features.

Step 4: answer the follow-up questions on your own pages

Google describes a "query fan-out" for AI Overviews and AI Mode: the system issues "multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources" before it writes the answer. In plain terms, one page that repeats your main keyword is less useful than a set of pages that each answer a real question a buyer asks next.

For a service business in the UAE, those follow-up questions are usually concrete: what exactly is included, what is not, how the process runs, what the client has to provide, which legal rules apply, how long things realistically take, and how to reach you. Each of these is a heading or a page you can write from your own knowledge. Generating dozens of thin pages with AI is the wrong way round; Google's spam policies call that scaled content abuse.

Google's other listed best practices are the familiar ones: important content in text form rather than only in images, internal links so pages can be found, and a good page experience on a phone.

Step 5: measure what arrives

There is no Search Console for ChatGPT, so you combine three sources and keep them apart in your reporting:

• Search Console for Google. Google states that traffic from AI features is included in the Performance report under the "Web" search type. There is no separate line for AI Overviews, so any figure claiming exact "AI Overview traffic" from Search Console is an estimate.
• Referrals from ChatGPT search. OpenAI's publisher documentation says links from ChatGPT search carry utm_source=chatgpt.com. In Google Analytics 4 or your own analytics, those visits show up under that source and can be counted.
• Enquiries with their landing page. The number that matters is enquiries. If every form submission and WhatsApp click is stored together with the page it came from, you can see which pages bring buyers, whatever sent them there.

Repeat the Step 1 questions once a month with the same wording. Change one thing at a time where you can, so you know what made the difference.

What not to pay for

• Guaranteed AI mentions or rankings. Nobody can promise what an assistant will say. Google itself says that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in Google.
• An llms.txt file sold as a ranking lever. Google says no new AI text files are needed for its AI features. Such a file does no harm, but it is not the reason a company gets named.
• Mass-produced AI pages. See Step 4.
• Bought reviews or links. Google's spam policies treat bought links as link spam, and invented reviews are a legal risk on top of that.

A one-page checklist

If you want help with it

We run this kind of check as the starting point of our SEO and AI visibility service: Search Console in your company's name, English and Arabic pages, consistent company facts and a monthly sample of AI answers, judged by enquiries rather than rankings. If the bigger gap is that enquiries arrive but are answered late, our WhatsApp AI Enquiry Desk is the other half of the problem.

Businesses in the UAE and Germany already rely on our next-gen AI technology. This article contains no client results. It describes the documented rules and the method, and you can run every step above without us.