Blog — 2026-08-06
There is no submission form, no paid placement and no advertising deal that puts your business inside ChatGPT's recommendations. AI assistants build their answers from what they can read and verify on the open web. Getting recommended therefore comes down to three conditions: being indexed — Google and Bing can crawl and understand your site; being corroborated — your name, services and location appear consistently in directories, reviews and articles the engines trust; and being quotable — your pages answer real questions in plain language an AI can lift into its reply. Meet those three conditions and you become a candidate. Skip them and you simply don't exist in the answer.
I'm Emad Yahya, a web developer and IT systems engineer based in Dubai. This is not theory for me: I built an AI-visibility SaaS that scans ChatGPT-, Gemini- and Perplexity-style engines alongside Google and scores how they present a brand — and I apply every fix on my own site, which ships as prerendered HTML with JSON-LD schema and an llms.txt file. Here is how the mechanics actually work, and what a Dubai business should do about them.
When someone asks an assistant for a recommendation — "best booking system developer in Dubai", "which clinic near Business Bay" — the assistant typically does two things. It draws on what its model learned during training, and, increasingly, it runs a live web search. ChatGPT's browsing has typically leaned on Bing's index, Gemini draws on Google's search, and Perplexity is built around live web retrieval.
The assistant then compresses what it finds — top-ranking pages, directory listings, "best of" articles, review profiles — into a short, confident reply. It doesn't show ten blue links; it names two or three businesses. Either you are in that answer, or you don't exist. That compression step is why GEO — generative engine optimization — is its own discipline: you are no longer competing for position eight on a results page, you are competing to be one of the few names the model considers safe to say.
Everything starts with the boring layer. If Google and Bing can't crawl, render and understand your site, no AI assistant will surface it, because the assistants sit downstream of those indexes. In practice that means fast pages, a clean sitemap, registration in both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools — Bing matters more than most Dubai businesses assume, precisely because of ChatGPT — and structured data.
Two details trip up modern sites. First, many crawlers still don't reliably execute JavaScript, so a site that only renders in the browser can look empty to the machines deciding whether to recommend you. My own site prerenders every page to static HTML for exactly this reason. Second, structured data (JSON-LD schema) tells engines what your pages are — a business, a service, an FAQ — instead of leaving them to guess. An llms.txt file, an emerging convention for handing AI assistants a curated map of your site, costs little to add; I publish one on this site, and my SaaS generates them.
An AI assistant is cautious about naming businesses. Before it recommends you, it typically wants your existence and your claims confirmed by sources it trusts: established directories, review platforms, comparison articles, an active Google Business profile. One self-hosted "we are the best" page is not evidence; the same facts repeated consistently across independent places is.
Consistency is the underrated part. Your business name, what you do and where you operate should read identically everywhere — website, directories, LinkedIn, reviews. Contradictions make you harder to verify, and models tend to skip names they can't verify. Note also which pages AI answers frequently draw from: "best X in Dubai" listicles and comparison pieces. Being genuinely present in credible ones — or publishing an honest, verifiable comparison yourself — puts you inside the exact source material the assistants quote.
Assistants assemble replies from fragments they can lift with confidence. Pages that bury the point under marketing copy give them nothing to lift. The fix is answer-shaped writing: one page per real question your customers ask, with a complete plain-language answer in the first two paragraphs, specifics instead of adjectives, and FAQ sections marked up with FAQPage schema so each question-and-answer pair is machine-readable.
This is where honesty becomes strategy rather than virtue. Concrete, verifiable claims — what you built, for whom, where it runs — survive AI compression. Hype does not.
This gap is why I built a product. You can track Google rankings, but AI answers are a black box — no console tells you what ChatGPT says about your market. So I built the AI Visibility & SEO/GEO Coach: it runs visibility scans across ChatGPT-, Gemini- and Perplexity-style engines alongside Google, tracks a visibility score and mention rate over time — AI vs Google side by side — and produces a prioritized action plan with fixes ranked by impact. It also generates the technical artefacts — JSON-LD schema, llms.txt, robots.txt — so fixes ship instead of sitting in a report.
The workflow is the point: scan, score, fix, re-scan. Whether you use my tool or simply ask the assistants your own market's questions by hand each month, measure before and after. One honest warning: nobody controls Google's index or an AI model's answers, and anyone guaranteeing you a ChatGPT mention is selling. What you can control is being indexed, corroborated and quotable — and that is what moves the score. If you want the work done for you, that is exactly what my SEO and GEO service in Dubai covers.
There is no submission form and no paid placement — AI assistants build answers from what they can read and verify on the open web. In practice that means a fast, crawlable site with structured data, pages that answer real questions directly, and your business named consistently in directories and articles the engines trust. Measure where you stand first, then fix in priority order.
GEO is the practice of making your business appear in AI-generated answers — the recommendations ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity give when someone asks a question in your market. It is also called AEO, answer engine optimization. The methods overlap heavily with classic SEO: structured data, fast crawlable pages, clear answer-shaped content, and consistent mentions of your brand across the web.
No — there is currently no way to buy a placement inside an AI assistant's organic recommendations, and anyone guaranteeing you a ChatGPT mention is selling. The answers are assembled from the open web, so the only durable route is making your business indexed, corroborated and quotable.
Yes — and it is mostly the same work. AI engines lean heavily on search indexes and on the same signals Google rewards: speed, structure and authority. Google still drives most discovery in Dubai today; GEO is the layer you add so you are also present where the questions are moving.
llms.txt is an emerging convention: a plain-text file at the root of your site that gives AI assistants a curated map of your pages and what they contain. It is not a magic ranking switch, but it costs little to add and makes your site easier for AI tools to read. I publish one on my own site, and my AI-visibility SaaS generates them.
SEO & AI Visibility (GEO) Services in Dubai · AI Visibility & SEO/GEO Coach — the SaaS · AI Developer in Dubai