Hiring a GEO agency in Dubai? What the work should look like, and 7 questions to ask first

A good GEO agency in Dubai starts by measuring whether ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity recommend you today, using a fixed list of real customer questions. Then it fixes the facts about your business across the web, gets you listed where those assistants look, and rewrites your key pages so they answer questions directly. If an agency cannot show you that first measurement, or promises a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT, keep looking.

"GEO agency Dubai" is now the search that brings the most people to our own site, so I assume many of you are being pitched GEO right now and wondering what you would actually be paying for. I run GEO for our own agency and for clients, and I measure our own results every week, including the weeks when the number is bad. This is the honest version of what the work involves.

What GEO is, in one paragraph

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of making AI assistants mention and recommend your business when someone asks them a question like "which clinic in Dubai does laser for sensitive skin?" SEO gets your website into Google's list of links. GEO gets your name into the answer itself. They overlap a lot, and if you want the longer comparison, we wrote about SEO vs GEO and whether you need both.

What the work should actually look like

Whoever you hire, the first month should contain these five things, roughly in this order.

1. A baseline you can read

Fifteen to thirty questions your real customers would ask, written in their words, in English and Arabic if your customers use both. Each one asked in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity in a fresh session, without your brand name. For each answer you should see: were you recommended, in what position, who else was named, and which sources the assistant cited. This is the single most useful document in the whole project. Without it, nobody can tell you whether anything worked.

2. Fixing the facts about you

AI assistants repeat what they find. If your name, area, phone number or services are different on Google Business Profile, your website and three directories, the assistant either picks the wrong version or leaves you out. The agency should list every place you appear and make them match.

3. Getting listed where the assistants look

In our own weekly checks, the answers about Dubai agencies cited directories and "best agencies" lists far more often than agency websites. Perplexity, for example, cited one agency directory in four of nine answers in a single week. A GEO agency should find out which sources the assistants cite in your industry and get you a complete, accurate profile there, with real reviews from real customers.

4. Pages that answer questions directly

The one time an assistant recommended us early on, it was for our most specific page, not our most general one. Pages that say plainly what you do, for whom, where, how long it takes and what changes the price get quoted. Pages full of slogans do not. Expect the agency to rewrite your service pages and add short FAQ answers, not to produce fifty generic blog posts.

5. Technical basics

The AI crawlers have to be allowed in your robots.txt, your pages need clean titles and structured data (schema), and your site should be indexed in Bing as well as Google, because several assistants, Copilot among them, draw on it. Some sites also add an llms.txt file, a plain summary of the business for AI tools. None of this is glamorous, and none of it should take more than a few days.

How you will know it is working

Ask for the same question list to be run again every month, or better, every week. The number that matters is simple: recommended in X of N answers. Ours started at 1 of 17. Some weeks it went up, one week it dropped to zero when agencies based in Lebanon took the places in the one answer we had been part of. That drop was useful, because it told us exactly which page to fix.

Website traffic from AI assistants is still small for most businesses, so do not judge GEO only on visits. Watch three things: the recommendation count, whether the cited sources now include you, and whether enquiries mention "I asked ChatGPT".

Red flags in a GEO pitch

• A guaranteed position in ChatGPT. Nobody controls what an assistant says. An agency can raise your chances; it cannot promise an answer.

• No baseline. If they start writing content before measuring, they are guessing with your money.

• Volume of AI written articles. Fifty thin posts rarely help and can make your site look less trustworthy.

• Fake reviews or invented listings. They can get a profile suspended, and AI assistants rely on exactly those platforms.

• Reports full of impressions and no answers. If the report never shows what the assistants actually said, ask why.

7 questions to ask before you sign

1. Which customer questions will you test, and can I add my own?

2. Will you show me the full answers, including who else was recommended and which sources were cited?

3. Which directories and lists do the assistants cite in my industry, and what will you do about each one?

4. Which of my pages will you rewrite first, and why those?

5. How will you handle Arabic questions, if my customers ask in Arabic?

6. How often will you re run the test, and what number are we aiming for in three months?

7. What will you not do? (A good answer includes fake reviews and guaranteed rankings.)

Ask these of us too. If you want to see what a measurement looks like before talking to anyone, our AI Visibility Index shows the method and the questions we use, and our guide on getting mentioned by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity lists the work you can start yourself.

Can you do GEO yourself?

Partly, yes. Running ten customer questions in a fresh ChatGPT chat once a month, fixing your Google Business Profile, matching your details across directories and asking happy customers for reviews costs time, not money. Where an agency earns its fee is the steady part: testing every week, reading the cited sources, rewriting pages and following up with directories and publishers until you are in.

FAQ

What does a GEO agency do?

A GEO agency measures whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity recommend your business, then improves the sources they rely on: your listings and reviews, the facts about you across the web, your website's pages and the technical basics that let AI crawlers read your site.

How long does GEO take to show results?

Fixing facts and listings can show up in AI answers within a few weeks, because assistants that search the web pick up changes quickly. Being recommended for competitive questions usually takes months of steady work, so judge progress monthly against the same set of questions.

Can a GEO agency guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend me?

No. No one controls what an AI assistant says. A serious agency shows you a baseline, explains what it will change and reports the same measurement every month. Treat any guarantee as a red flag.

Is GEO different for Arabic searches in the UAE?

Yes. In our tests, questions asked in Arabic often produced a partly different list of businesses than the same question in English. If your customers ask in Arabic, the question list and the pages should include Arabic too.

Do I still need SEO if I do GEO?

Yes. Many AI assistants search the web before answering, and pages that rank well and answer clearly are easier for them to find and quote. GEO builds on good SEO rather than replacing it.

Curious where you stand today? We can run your first set of customer questions with you. See our SEO and GEO service in Dubai, or message Point One on WhatsApp.