Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making your brand easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand, trust and cite when they answer a question. UAE brands should care now because these assistants have become a front door to the web, and no country has a higher share of people using them: Microsoft's AI diffusion report puts generative AI use at 73.3% of the UAE's working-age population in the second quarter of 2026, against 18.8% worldwide.
Try this before you read on. Open ChatGPT and type "Who are the best [your category] companies in Dubai?" Then ask "What is [your brand]?" If the first answer names three competitors and the second gets your services, location or founder wrong, that is what a growing share of your buyers see before they ever reach your website.
Why this matters now
At its October 2026 DevDay, OpenAI described ChatGPT as a platform reaching 1.2 billion weekly users. At Google I/O in May 2026, Sundar Pichai said AI Overviews had over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users within a year of launch.
In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots and virtual agents took market share. We will not claim that exact figure has landed; Google is still enormous. The practical point is that the same question is now answered in two places, a list of links and a written answer, and your brand needs to show up in both.
How AI assistants pick their sources
An assistant can answer from two places: what its model learned during training, and what it retrieves from the web while answering. For questions about a business, such as prices, services or who to hire in Dubai, live retrieval matters most, and that is the part you can influence.
Retrieval: can they reach your pages?
OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". Google's guidance on AI features says a page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in Google Search to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that both may run a "query fan-out", issuing several related searches across subtopics to build one answer.
Citation: is your page worth quoting?
The most useful public research on what gets cited is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal and colleagues, presented at KDD 2024. Testing on a benchmark of 10,000 queries, the authors found that:
- Citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics gave the strongest results, a relative improvement of 30 to 40% on their main visibility measure.
- Clearer, more fluent writing gave a boost of 15 to 30%.
- Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit, offered "little to no improvement".
- Lower-ranked pages gained most. Citing sources lifted visibility by 115.1% for pages ranked fifth in search results, while the top-ranked page's visibility fell by 30.3% on average.
When they repeated the tests on Perplexity, a live engine, they saw improvements of up to 37%. Treat these as direction, not a promise: it was a research setup, and engines change. Still, the lesson is clear: evidence and clarity help, and keyword tricks do not.
Entity trust: are they sure who you are?
An assistant can only recommend a business it can identify with confidence. If your trade name differs between your website, LinkedIn and Google Business Profile, or another company has a similar name, it may confuse you with someone else or leave you out. Google says Organization structured data helps it understand your administrative details and "disambiguate your organization in search results".
The GEO checklist
Work through these in order. The first three are technical fixes your web team can usually make quickly.
- Serve crawlable HTML. Many sites build their content with JavaScript in the browser. Google's JavaScript SEO guide recommends server-side rendering or pre-rendering because "not all bots can run JavaScript". Test it: open your page, choose View Source, and check that your headline and main text are in the raw HTML.
- Let the right AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt and any firewall or CDN bot settings. Allow the search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) if you want to be cited; the table below shows what each crawler does.
- Add structured data that matches the page. Mark up your Organization, founders (Person), articles and FAQs in JSON-LD. Google says there is no special schema needed for its AI features, so treat markup as a way to remove ambiguity, not a shortcut, and keep it identical to the visible text.
- Make your entity consistent everywhere. Use one company name, one address format, one phone number and the same founder names on your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and press releases. Link your official profiles from your Organization markup with
sameAs. - Answer the question in the first paragraph. A short, self-contained answer is easy for an assistant to lift and quote. Open each key page with two or three sentences that answer the main question directly, then expand. Our guide to WhatsApp AI agents opens this way.
- Use statistics with named sources. Replace "most customers prefer" with a figure, a source and a year, and link to it. Statistics were one of the three most effective methods in the GEO paper.
- Write FAQs from real customer questions. Pull them from sales calls, WhatsApp chats and support tickets, in the words customers use, and answer each in 40 to 80 words.
- Earn authoritative mentions. Your website is only one of the pages an assistant can read about you. Press coverage, industry associations, reviews and respected directories all add to the picture.
- Publish an llms.txt file. llms.txt is a proposal from Jeremy Howard, first published in September 2024, for a short Markdown file at your site root that summarises who you are and links to your key pages. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google publish one for their developer docs. Google says you do not need AI text files to appear in its AI features, so do this last: it is cheap, not decisive.
| Crawler | Company | What it does | Blocking it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Surfaces sites in ChatGPT search | You will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Collects content that may train OpenAI models | Your content should not be used for training |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | Indexes content for Claude's search results | Lower visibility in Claude search results |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Collects content that may train Claude models | Future content excluded from training |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Surfaces and links sites in Perplexity results | Your site may not appear in Perplexity results |
| Google-Extended | Controls use for Gemini training and grounding | No effect on Google Search inclusion or ranking |
Sources: OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google. Training and search are separate decisions: you can block training crawlers and still allow search crawlers. Fetchers triggered by a user's question, such as ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User, may not follow robots.txt in the usual way, according to both companies.
UAE specifics
English and Arabic
Many UAE customers ask questions in Arabic, and if your Arabic content is thin, an assistant answering in Arabic has little of yours to work with. Google's multilingual guidance is a sound base: a separate URL for each language version, hreflang links between them, one language per page and no side-by-side translations, because Google works out a page's language from its visible content. Start with Arabic versions of your highest-value service pages and FAQs, written by a native speaker, with the same prices and facts as the English.
Google Business Profile
Google's local ranking guidance says complete and accurate profiles are more likely to show in local results, and that prominence draws on how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. Fill in every field, choose precise categories, keep hours current through Ramadan and public holidays, and reply to reviews in the language they were written in.
Local directories and press
In the UAE, the third-party pages worth earning are coverage in established regional business and news titles, your free zone or chamber listing, industry association member pages and the review platforms your sector relies on. One accurate mention on a trusted site is worth more than dozens of thin directory listings with your details spelt three different ways.
How to check what AI assistants say about you today
Before changing anything, record a baseline. Run the same prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode, each in a fresh chat, and save the answers and cited links in a spreadsheet. Answers vary from one run to the next, so run each prompt two or three times.
| Prompt | What it tests | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
| "What is [brand]?" | Whether the assistant knows you | Correct services, location and founders; no confusion with a similarly named company |
| "Who are the best [category] companies in Dubai?" | Category visibility | Whether you are named, which competitors appear, which sources are cited |
| "[Brand] vs [competitor]" | Comparison framing | Accurate positioning; old prices or discontinued services |
| "Is [brand] good? What do customers say?" | Reputation | Which review sites and articles are cited, and the tone of the summary |
| "How much does [service] cost in the UAE?" | Commercial questions | Whether your pricing or service page is used as a source |
| The category question in Arabic | Arabic visibility | Whether you appear at all, and whether facts match your English answers |
| "Who founded [brand]?" | People and authority | Founder named correctly, linked to the right profile |
The cited links matter as much as the answer. If an assistant keeps citing an old directory listing or a competitor's comparison page, that page is shaping how you are described, and fixing or outweighing it becomes a priority.
Measuring results
- AI assistant referrals in GA4. Google Analytics now has an AI Assistant channel for visits from sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok. It relies on the referrer, so some app traffic will still show as direct. OpenAI's publisher FAQ adds that ChatGPT appends utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links.
- Google's AI features in Search Console. The GA4 channel excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google counts that traffic within your overall web search traffic in Search Console.
- Branded search. Watch impressions for your brand name in Search Console. People who see you named in an AI answer may search for you rather than click, so this is a useful indirect signal.
- Citation tracking. Re-run your prompt table monthly and track three things: how often you are named, whether the facts are right and which of your pages are cited.
What we changed on octorion.io
We applied the same checklist to our own site. octorion.io now has:
- Prerendered HTML. Every page is rendered to static HTML at build time, so crawlers that do not run JavaScript can read the full content.
- Unique page metadata. Each page has its own title, description and canonical URL.
- Structured data. JSON-LD for Organization, Person (our founder), WebSite, BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage.
- A sitemap and an llms.txt file. sitemap.xml lists every page we want found, and /llms.txt gives assistants a plain summary of who we are and what we do.
- Explicit crawler access. Our robots.txt allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and Bingbot by name.
These changes are new, so we have no results to report yet. We will measure them the way this article describes and share what we learn.
Get your brand into the answer
GEO decides whether your name is in the answer, described correctly and linked to a page that converts. Most of it is careful, unglamorous work: clean HTML, open doors for the right crawlers, consistent facts and content that shows its evidence.
As marketers, we start from the questions your customers ask, not the technology. If you would like us to run the prompt test on your brand and walk you through what we find, book a call with us.
