Somewhere in your inbox there is a proposal for AEO, or GEO, or “AI search optimisation”. It will explain that search has changed, that traditional SEO is dead, and that a new discipline is required — theirs, monthly, on a twelve-month minimum.
Before you sign it, read what Google actually publishes about this. It takes about four minutes and it is unusually blunt.
What Google says, in Google's words
From AI Features and Your Website, the official documentation:
There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.
And on the structured data that most AEO proposals are built around:
Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add.
That is the vendor of the largest AI search surface in the world saying, in its own developer documentation, that the product being sold to you does not exist as a separate discipline. Google still recommends structured data — it makes you eligible for rich results in ordinary search — but it is explicit that it is not an AI-specific lever.
This matters commercially. If someone is charging you a premium for AEO work, ask them which requirement they are meeting that ordinary SEO does not already cover. The honest answer is none.
So why do some businesses get cited and others do not?
Because the underlying question has not changed: is there something on your site worth quoting?
An AI answer is assembled from sources. To be one of them, a page has to contain a specific, checkable claim that answers a real question. Not a paragraph about being a leading provider of innovative solutions — a sentence a model can lift and attribute.
Consider two pages about the same service.
Page A: “We are Dubai's premier web development agency, delivering world-class digital experiences tailored to your unique business needs.”
Page B: “A five-page brochure site with Arabic and English, built on our design system, starts at $5,000 and takes six weeks from the day we have final copy. It does not include photography or ongoing content entry.”
Page A is unquotable. There is no fact in it. Page B contains four: a scope, a price, a timeline, and an exclusion. If someone asks an assistant what a bilingual brochure site costs in Dubai, only one of those pages can be part of the answer.
Google's own guidance for AI experiences says the same thing in flatter language: make “unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful”. Non-commodity is the operative word. Adjectives are a commodity. Numbers, exclusions and specifics are not.
The four things that actually apply
None of these are new. That is the point.
1. The page has to render. If your content only appears after JavaScript executes, you are betting on every crawler executing it. Server-rendered HTML is not a preference here, it is the difference between being readable and being invisible.
2. It has to be fast enough to be fetched. The same Core Web Vitals work that helps ordinary rankings helps here, for the ordinary reason that a page which times out contributes nothing to anyone's answer.
3. It has to say something falsifiable. Prices, timelines, what is included, what is not. The instinct to keep those vague to preserve negotiating room is the instinct that removes you from the answer entirely.
4. It has to be attributable. Clear authorship, a real organisation, consistent identity markup across the site. This is ordinary structured data, done once, for ordinary reasons.
If your agency's AI proposal contains items outside that list, ask what evidence supports them.
The part nobody mentions: you can measure this
Google ships a Generative AI performance report inside Search Console. It shows how your content is being surfaced through generative AI features on Search and Discover.
It is free, it is first-party, and it is already sitting in an account you almost certainly have. Before commissioning any AI visibility work, open it and look at the baseline. Then look again in ninety days. Any agency unwilling to be measured against a report Google publishes for free is telling you something.
Two caveats worth knowing. It reports on Google's AI features — not ChatGPT, not Perplexity, not Claude. And nobody outside those companies has reliable data on how the others select sources; anyone quoting you a citation rate for ChatGPT is quoting an estimate.
The GCC-specific part
Two things are true here that are not true in every market.
Arabic is under-served. The volume of high-quality, genuinely useful Arabic business content on the open web is a fraction of the English equivalent. An assistant asked a question in Arabic has fewer good sources to choose from. That is an opening, and it does not require any special technique — it requires actually publishing in Arabic rather than machine-translating an English page and hoping.
Local specificity is scarce. “What does a website cost” has ten thousand answers. “What does a bilingual website cost for a company with a Dubai trade licence, and who owns the domain afterwards” has very few. The narrower and more locally grounded the question you answer properly, the more likely you are to be the source.
We wrote about the other half of this shift when ChatGPT started selling ads — and reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction. The work is the same work.
What we would do first
In order, and none of it needs a new retainer:
- Open the Generative AI report in Search Console and screenshot the baseline. You cannot claim improvement without it.
- Find your three most commercially important pages and count the checkable facts on each. If a page has none, that is the work.
- Publish your prices, or the shape of them. This is the single highest-leverage change most firms refuse to make. We publish our engagement levels and what sits inside each, and it is the most-quoted thing we have.
- Write the Arabic properly rather than translating it. Different sentence, different examples, same standard.
- Then check the report again. Ninety days, same screenshot.
If you would rather have someone else do that audit, send us the brief — and if the honest answer is that your site is already fine and the money is better spent elsewhere, we will tell you that instead.