See What AI Says About Your Business. Then Ask in Arabic.

A customer in Riyadh wants a salon. They don't open Google and scroll. They type the question into ChatGPT, read the three names it gives back, and pick one.

You have no idea whether yours was in there.

You can find out what AI says about your business in about twenty minutes, for nothing, using the same phone you're reading this on. No tool, no budget, no agency. Ask the engine the question your customer asks, once in English and once in Arabic, and write down who it names. Here's the whole check, and what the answer is telling you.

Start with the answer you're missing

You're missing a baseline. Not a strategy, not a score out of a hundred, just the plain fact of whether a machine names you when someone asks for a business like yours.

Almost every owner we talk to has read something about getting found by AI and has never once asked an engine about their own shop. It's an odd blind spot, because the check is free and the result changes what you do next. If you're already being named, the job is holding the position. If you're nowhere, the job is completely different, and much bigger.

So do the cheap thing before the expensive thing.

Why the free check beats the paid one, for now

Because the paid tools measure change, and you don't have a starting point to change from yet.

HubSpot published a roundup of AEO checker tools on 23 September 2026, and followed it with a head to head between two of them. That's a category forming in public, which tells you the question matters. It also tells you who the question is being sold to: a marketing team with a monthly budget and a list of competitor brands to watch. Not a clinic with three staff.

Those tools are good at one thing you can't do by hand, which is watching a number move over months across dozens of prompts. That's real value, later. Right now you have a different question, and it's a one-time question: am I in the answer or not.

Worth knowing before you read anything else on this subject: one review graded 225 claims across eleven popular AEO guides and found 45 percent cite nothing at all, with only 8 percent linking to a primary source. The advice layer around this topic is mostly confident and unsourced. Running the check yourself is the one piece of evidence nobody can sell you.

The check, step by step

Twenty minutes, four passes, one page of notes. Do it on a phone if that's what's nearby.

Pass one: the customer's question, in English. Open a new chat in ChatGPT so nothing from your history leans on the answer. Don't mention your business. Ask it the way a customer would: the best salon in Olaya, a reliable phone repair shop in Jeddah, a dental clinic near King Abdullah Road. Write down every business it names, in order.

Pass two: the same question, in Arabic. New chat again. Same question, same city, Arabic this time. Write down the names. This is the pass most people skip and it's the one that usually produces the surprise.

Pass three: your business by name. Now ask directly. What do you know about [your business name] in [your city]. You're looking for three things: whether it knows you exist, whether the details are right, and where the information came from. Wrong opening hours in an AI answer are not a small problem, because you can't correct a machine the way you'd correct a person.

Pass four: one other engine. Repeat pass one and pass two in Gemini or Perplexity. You're not building a league table. You're checking whether the first result was a quirk of one model.

Keep the notes in one place, dated. In three months you'll want to compare, and memory won't do it.

What the two languages tell you

They tell you which half of your reputation exists.

An answer engine builds its reply out of pages, and it reaches for pages in the language of the question. Ask in English and it reads English sources. Ask in Arabic and it reads Arabic ones. So a business can be well covered in one language and a blank space in the other, and the owner has no way of knowing which without asking twice.

We see this in the ordinary search results too. When we checked the Arabic phrase for business management software in Saudi Arabia this month, the first page was Daftra, Wazen, SMACC and SAP's Arabic MENA pages. The English phrase for the same intent returned a completely different set: Capterra, G2, Software Advice and a row of North American vendors. Same question, same country, two separate worlds of companies.

Your business sits somewhere in that split. Most Saudi SMBs we've looked at have a thinner Arabic footprint than they assume, because the listings, profiles and write-ups that exist about them were filled in once, in whichever language was convenient that day.

The fix isn't glamorous. It's making sure the pages that already mention you exist in Arabic as well, starting with the ones you control.

Read where the answer came from

The useful part of an AI answer is the source underneath it, not your name in it.

When an engine names a business, look at what it's leaning on. A directory listing. A review page. A local news mention. Somebody's blog. That's the source that's currently doing the work, and it's almost never the business's own website. We covered why in To Get Mentioned by ChatGPT, Stop Fixing Your Website: most of what an engine cites about a small business was published by somebody else.

Two things worth noticing while you read:

How many names fit. An analysis of 40,000 AI answers found ChatGPT averages about 2.62 citations per answer, against roughly 6.61 for Perplexity and 6.1 for Gemini, reported by AirOps. ChatGPT is the engine most of your customers are using and it hands out the fewest slots. Being the fourth best option in your city is, on that engine, the same as not existing.

How fresh the sources are. The same research found that for commercial and comparison questions, 83 percent of cited pages had been updated within the past twelve months, and more than 60 percent within six. A listing you filled in three years ago and never touched is competing with pages that were edited last month.

What to write down, and in what shape

One table, four columns, filled in by hand. That's the whole deliverable.

What you asked	Language	Who got named	What the answer leaned on
Best salon in Olaya	English	three names, not us	two directory pages and a blog roundup
Best salon in Olaya	Arabic	different three names	one review page, one local listing
What do you know about [us]	English	knows us, hours wrong	our own page and one directory
What do you know about [us]	Arabic	doesn't recognise the name	nothing

Fill in your own version. The pattern in the fourth column is the instruction: whatever type of page is already getting cited for your category is the type of page you need to be on. If directories are doing the work, your listings are the job. If review pages are, then asking customers for reviews at the moment they're happiest is the job.

The part no machine can read

Your best channel is invisible to all of this, and it's worth saying out loud.

In the Kingdom, most recommendations travel through WhatsApp. Somebody asks a group where to get a phone screen fixed and three people answer. That's the real engine, and no model can see inside it. You can be the most recommended repair shop in your neighbourhood and still be absent from every AI answer about repair shops in your city.

That's not a reason to give up on it. It's the reason the check matters. Being the name people pass around in a group chat doesn't put you in a machine's answer by itself, and nobody crosses that gap by accident.

Where this gets easier

The tedious part of all this isn't the audit. It's that the answer an engine gives about you is assembled from a dozen places that all have to say the same thing, and those places drift apart the moment your details live in different systems.

One phone number in your booking app, an older one on a directory, a third on the invoice template. Every one of those was correct when someone typed it. Business management software like Swarlet keeps the details of the business in one place, so the version that ends up on a listing or an invoice or a reply to a customer is the same version everywhere. It doesn't get you cited. It stops you contradicting yourself while you try.

If you're still choosing what to run your business on, that decision comes first.

Figures in this post

Current as of September 2026. These move, and a page built on them goes stale quietly, so they live here in one block.

• ChatGPT averages about 2.62 citations per AI answer, Perplexity about 6.61, Gemini about 6.1. From an analysis of 40,000 answers, reported by AirOps, which sells AI search tooling.
• For commercial and evaluation questions, 83 percent of cited pages were updated within twelve months, over 60 percent within six. Same source, same caveat.
• 45 percent of claims across eleven AEO guides cite no source, 8 percent link a primary one. Via Green Flag Digital.
• Google's AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode has passed one billion, per Search Engine Roundtable's September 2026 roundup.

Next review: February 2027.

Do the twenty minutes

Open a new chat, ask the question a customer would ask, then ask it again in Arabic. Write down who got named. That's the whole assignment, and it's the only step here that can't be skipped, because everything else depends on knowing where you actually stand.

Once you've got your page of notes, the on-site checklist tells you what to fix on your own property.

We're not open yet. If the details of your business are scattered across half a dozen places, join the waitlist and we'll bring you in early.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check what ChatGPT says about my business?

Open a new chat, don't mention your name, and ask the question a customer would ask: the best shop of your type in your city. Then read who gets named and what the answer leans on. Run it once in English and once in Arabic, because the two don't return the same businesses.

Do I need to pay for an AI visibility tool?

Not to start. The paid tools track movement over time for a list of brands, which is worth money once you know where you stand. The first answer costs nothing and takes about twenty minutes, and most owners find out something in that first pass that no dashboard would have told them faster.

Why do Arabic and English give different answers about my business?

Because they read different pages. An answer engine assembles its reply from sources in the language of the question, so a business with a thick English footprint and a thin Arabic one is visible in one and absent in the other. Almost nobody has checked which side they're on.

How many businesses get named in an AI answer?

Fewer than you'd hope on ChatGPT. An analysis of 40,000 AI answers found ChatGPT averages about 2.62 citations per answer, against roughly 6.61 for Perplexity and 6.1 for Gemini. On the engine most people actually use, there are two or three slots, not seven.

Should I use my own name when I test this?

Run both, in that order. Ask the customer's question first, without your name, because that's the answer that decides whether you get the work. Then ask about your business directly, which tells you what the engine believes about you once it knows who you are.

How often should I re-run the check?

Every three months, and after anything that changes your footprint, like a new location or a wave of reviews. Weekly checks read as noise. The answers shift on their own from day to day, so a quarterly comparison is the only one that means anything.

What do I do if I'm not named at all?

Nothing on your own website first. Most of what an engine cites about a local business was published by somebody else, so the work is getting named on pages you don't own and making sure your details agree everywhere they appear.