How to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews: A guide for brands in the Middle East

If you’ve recently searched on Google, you probably noticed that most of the time you get your answer before clicking a single link. An AI Overview pops up at the top telling you what you came to find out. Meanwhile, a growing number of people aren’t searching on Google at all, they’re asking AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity.

This unlocks a new layer of online visibility for businesses. While ranking on Google remains important, brands must also make their presence easy for AI platforms to find, understand, and reference. That’s the goal behind Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): improving a brand’s ability to appear within AI-generated answers, whether through a citation, brand mention, recommendation, or referenced source. 

This guide explains how AI systems select their sources and what businesses in the Middle East need to do to be cited by them.

What AI Search actually is 

A normal Google search gives you a list of ten clickable links and lets you decide which one has the answer you’re looking for. AI search tools, such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT’s search mode, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, skip that step completely. They read multiple sources, synthesize an answer, and hand it to the user as a finished paragraph.

That difference changes what ranking actually means. In traditional SEO, ranking #1 gets you the click. In AI search, ranking well still matters, it’s usually what puts a page in the pool of sources a model even considers, but it’s not everything. The end goal becomes something closer to: does the model find this page trustworthy, clear, and specific enough to quote or cite directly, out of everything else it could have pulled from instead.

This is the core idea behind generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO): optimizing not just to rank, but to be the specific passage an AI model chooses to lift and attribute. 

What we know about how AI platforms surface sources

The complete source-selection systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI experiences are not publicly disclosed. Brands should therefore be cautious of anyone claiming to know a universal set of AI ranking factors. 

Google AI Overviews pull heavily from pages already ranking well organically, then filter from there. The pages that make the cut tend to share specific traits: a direct answer to the exact question within the first 40-60 words, a non-promotional tone, a high density of named entities (specific brands, places, numbers), and structured data like FAQ or HowTo schema. Miss any one of these and even a top-ranking page can get passed over.

Perplexity draws on a narrower, more curated pool of sources, which makes domain authority and source diversity carry more weight per citation. Its evaluation runs candidate pages through relevance, factual accuracy, freshness, structural quality, and authority checks before anything earns a citation. Content built around research, named statistics, case studies, and direct expert quotes performs well here, because that’s exactly what a synthesis engine is looking to pull from and attribute.

ChatGPT search doesn’t just take the top Google result. It scans what’s available, weighs how cleanly it can extract structured information, and often triangulates across several sources rather than leaning on one authority. It also relies heavily on Bing’s index for real-time retrieval, so a page’s visibility in Bing directly shapes whether ChatGPT can find and cite it. This is part of why plain-language, clearly formatted content (short lists, clear Q&A structure, semantic HTML) gets picked up even from sites that aren’t dominating traditional search rankings. Technically messy pages, heavy scripts, and content buried behind interactive elements can be functionally invisible to it even if a human reader would find them fine.

Six ways Middle East brands can improve AI visibility 

1. Build on strong technical SEO foundations

Content can’t earn visibility when search systems can’t reliably access it. Brands should first check whether important pages are:

• Crawlable and indexable
• Connected through internal links
• Available within the page’s HTML
• Supported by correct canonical tags
• Accessible on mobile
• Free from major duplication issues
• Properly managed across Arabic and English versions

Google confirms that existing technical SEO requirements continue to apply to its generative AI search features. Publishing more content before fixing fundamental accessibility problems is usually the wrong priority.

2. Focus on questions connected to real decisions

A GEO strateg should not begin and end with a traditional keyword list. Users can ask AI platforms detailed questions containing their location, industry, objectives, and commercial constraints. Brands should therefore map questions across different stages:

Problem identification

• Why is our website traffic increasing without generating more sales?
• Why is our company not appearing in AI-generated recommendations?

Solution research

• What is the difference between SEO and GEO?
• Can conversion rate optimization reduce acquisition costs?

Partner evaluation

• What should a company look for in a performance marketing agency?
• Which agencies have experience across the UAE and Saudi Arabia?

Implementation

• How should Arabic and English content be structured?
• How can a business measure its visibility in ChatGPT?

Platforms such as PEEC AI can help identify recurring prompts and monitor which brands and sources appear. However, prompt data should guide the editorial strategy, not replace it.

3. Answer clearly without writing mechanically

The main question should be answered early. A strong article should:

1. Define the subject.
2. Provide a direct initial answer.
3. Explain the reasoning.
4. Add evidence and examples.
5. Address limitations and related questions.

The goal is not to write for a crawler. It is to make the information easy for people and machines to interpret.

4. Publish expertise competitors cannot reproduce

Generic information has become easy to generate. An article summarizing the basic benefits of SEO provides little proof that the publisher has practical experience.

Google recommends creating unique, non-commodity content based on first-hand knowledge and a distinctive point of view rather than recycling what already exists online.

For Middle East brands, stronger content could include:

• Regional campaign or website benchmarks
• Anonymized client results
• Differences observed between markets
• Original research
• Controlled experiments
• Practical frameworks
• Commentary from specialists managing active projects
• Lessons that international content overlooks

Internal statistics should always include enough context to be credible:

• Period examined
• Markets covered
• Sample size
• Methodology
• Metric definition
• Important limitations

5. Develop an Arabic strategy, not just translations

A translated English page is not automatically an effective Arabic resource. Brands should investigate whether Arabic-speaking users:

• Ask the same questions as English-speaking users
• Use the same terminology
• Have the same level of subject awareness
• Need different examples
• Expect locally relevant information
• Mix Arabic and English terminology in their prompts

The English and Arabic strategies can share evidence and positioning, but each language should have its own question research and editorial decisions.

6. Strengthen the brand beyond its own website

AI platforms can encounter information about a business across its wider digital footprint. This may include:

• Industry publications
• Partner websites
• Case studies
• Interviews
• Research reports
• Event pages
• Reviews
• Relevant directories.

Google specifically warns that pursuing inauthentic mentions or artificial references is not a useful shortcut for its AI search features. Instead, brands should create a consistent and verifiable presence.

What happens when you fix Bing indexing? A real ChatGPT visibility test

We tested this directly with an e-commerce beauty and skincare retailer client. Enabling IndexNow through Cloudflare meant every new or updated product page was pushed automatically to Bing’s index, the index ChatGPT search draws from.

On 19 May, a batch of roughly 22,300 URLs was submitted to IndexNow in a single day (of which about 1,300 were confirmed indexed by Bing). That same day, ChatGPT referral sessions peaked at 423, the highest recorded in the tracked period. When submissions dropped to just 14 the next day, sessions fell just as fast, down to 15 by 2 June.

That pattern is the real lesson: this kind of technical fix can move ChatGPT visibility within a day, but a single push doesn’t hold, it needs a standing submission cadence to compound. The team is now moving to a weekly automated submission process to keep the effect from fading, rather than relying on one-off pushes.