You can't buy your way into a ChatGPT recommendation, and most of what the models cite is out of your hands. What you can do is make your business easy for AI systems to find, verify and cross-check: let the right crawlers in, keep your business details identical everywhere they appear, publish pages that answer real questions in plain HTML, and collect reviews that mention what you actually do. That's the honest core of AI search optimization, and most of it is the same work that earns you Google rankings. The rest of this article is about proportion: how much this channel matters today, how the models actually pick businesses, and which of the popular "GEO" tactics you can safely ignore.
How many customers are actually asking ChatGPT?
Fewer than the hype suggests, and more than last year by a wide margin.
SE Ranking's traffic analysis put AI assistants at roughly 0.24% of global internet traffic in January 2026, up from about 0.15% a year earlier. By the same dataset, organic search still drove around 345 times more visits than ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity combined. If someone is selling you an "AI search package" on the premise that Google is finished, that's the number to show them.
The counterweight is quality. Adobe Digital Insights found AI-referred visitors converting about 31% better than other traffic in early 2026, and Similarweb's data puts ChatGPT referral conversion around 7%, second only to paid search in their comparison. This matches what we see in client inboxes in Dubai: enquiries that start with "ChatGPT recommended you" are rare, but the person has usually already decided you're on their shortlist. The assistant did the comparison shopping for them.
So the sober framing is a small, fast-growing channel with unusually warm visitors. Worth real effort. Not worth panic, and not worth abandoning the channels that still bring 99% of your demand.
Where ChatGPT gets its answers about businesses
Two different mechanisms produce a recommendation, and they reward slightly different things.
The first is the model's training data. When someone asks "best accounting firms for freezone companies in Dubai" without live search running, the answer comes from patterns absorbed months ago: directories, review platforms, press coverage, forum threads. You influence this slowly, by existing in many trustworthy places over time, and there is no way to rush it.
The second is live search. ChatGPT's search mode fetches current web pages, leaning partly on Bing's index, and OpenAI runs a dedicated crawler called OAI-SearchBot for it. This is the mechanism you can actually work with on a timescale of weeks, and it behaves in ways that are now reasonably well documented.
Ahrefs studied ChatGPT's 1,000 most-cited pages in late 2025 and the pattern is sobering. Wikipedia alone took nearly 30% of citations, homepages another 24%, and among cited pages that rank at all, two-thirds sat on very strong domains (Domain Rating 81 or higher). By their estimate only around a third of citations come from content types a business can realistically influence: educational articles, reviews, news coverage, blogs. The same study found a strong recency bias, with almost 90% of cited pages (where dates were detectable) updated within the past year.
Read that again as a strategy: you're not going to out-cite Wikipedia. You're competing for the influenceable third, and freshness counts.
The work that actually moves the needle
Start with crawler access, because it's the cheapest fix and the most common silent failure. Check your robots.txt and your firewall rules for OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. Plenty of UAE sites blocked "all AI bots" in 2023–2024 when the worry was content scraping, and those rules are still quietly in place. Note that GPTBot is a separate OpenAI crawler used for model training; blocking it is a legitimate choice that doesn't affect whether ChatGPT search can cite you. While you're there, submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, which almost nobody in Dubai bothers with because Bing's direct traffic share here is tiny. Its index now matters for a second reason.
Then, consistency. AI systems cross-check before they recommend, so your business name, locations, phone number, services and pricing signals need to match across your website, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and the directories and portals relevant to your sector. For a Dubai clinic that means your DHA-licensed facility name, not three variations of it. For a restaurant, the same name and area on Zomato, Google and your own site. We covered what moves a profile up in our Google Maps ranking guide, and all of it compounds here, because the models treat your Business Profile and its reviews as evidence.
Reviews deserve their own line in the budget. Review text is exactly the kind of third-party, specific, dated material these systems weigh, and a steady flow of reviews that mention the service and the location ("fixed our villa AC in Arabian Ranches the same day") beats a wall of five-star ratings that say "great service". In a market where half your customers would rather send a WhatsApp message than write anything public, you have to engineer the ask: a follow-up message with a direct review link, sent while the job is still fresh.
On your own site, write pages that answer questions the way people ask them. One service per page, prices as honest ranges in AED, service areas named in text, credentials spelled out. Keep the substance in plain HTML rather than rendered by JavaScript, because testing in 2026 repeatedly showed ChatGPT's crawler reading HTML only. (Unglamorous, yes. So is most work that compounds.) If your site already does this, you've done most of what "GEO" audits charge for, and if it doesn't, the fix pays for itself in ordinary search too. This is the same structural work we do in conversion-focused website builds, which is convenient: pages built to convince a human also happen to be the easiest pages for a model to quote.
The last lever is third-party mentions, and it's the slowest. Industry press, sector roundups, chamber and association listings, genuine "best of" features. Earned mentions, not paid link schemes, which carry the same risk with AI systems as with Google.
The "AI search optimization" you can skip
Skip llms.txt. It's a proposed file that's supposed to guide AI crawlers, and it became a line item in agency proposals within months. Google has said plainly it doesn't use it, and SE Ranking's analysis of 300,000 domains found no correlation between having the file and AI search visibility. Ten minutes to add, zero evidence it does anything. Spend the time on reviews instead.
Be equally skeptical of standalone "AI search optimization packages" sold as something separate from SEO. Roughly 80% of the work is identical: crawlable site, clear pages, consistent business data, reviews, mentions. Paying twice for the same deliverables under two names is the most common waste we find when auditing what Dubai businesses already pay for, right next to the retainer problems we unpacked in what SEO should cost in Dubai. A good SEO engagement should already include the handful of genuinely AI-specific tasks; they amount to a checklist, not a discipline.
One more thing worth knowing: Similarweb's 2026 research found around a quarter of ChatGPT responses now carrying ads. Sponsored placement in AI answers is arriving whether anyone likes it or not, but as of October 2026 there is still no way to pay for the organic recommendation itself. Anyone offering guaranteed ChatGPT placement is selling something that doesn't exist.
Start with the test you can run today
Open ChatGPT, turn on search, and ask it the three questions a real customer would ask before hiring you, in English and, if your market warrants it, in Arabic. Note who gets named and which sources get cited, then look at your own presence in those exact sources. That gap is your to-do list, in priority order, for free.
If you'd rather we run that audit and fix what it finds, talk to us. It's the same growth system we build for search, pointed at where search is going.