We measure how AI assistants answer buying questions in the UAE, and publish what we find — including the parts that do not flatter us. Raw data, stated methods, and comparisons built only on figures vendors publish themselves.
Six engines answering 22 software buying questions cited 25 third-party hosts 2,061 times, and our own site 106. Reddit alone beat every roundup. ChatGPT cited three outside hosts in three weeks; Perplexity cited 23. The full source anatomy, verified by opening every cited page.
A car-servicing directory scoring 62 out of 100 on traditional search scores 3 out of 100 in AI answers. We measured two UAE businesses daily across all six engines and published the raw grid, the method, and the mechanism behind the gap.
Nine platforms compared strictly on their own published pricing pages — Profound, AthenaHQ, Scrunch AI, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Otterly, Peec, Cognizo, SE Visible and Cituna. Which engines arrive at the entry tier, why Grok is the real gap, and one correction to our own August claim.
Ranking well and being cited are different outcomes with different inputs. Which of your existing search work carries over, which is wasted effort, and why Search Console is the only dataset that connects the two channels.
Entry pricing runs $29 to $899 a month, and most of it is built for teams with a dedicated analyst. What an owner-operated business actually needs, what it can skip, and a free ten-minute self-check.
Easy to sell, easy to lose money on. Platform selection on delivery economics, engagement scoping, why you price the fix rather than the dashboard, and the four traps that turn this into unbilled work.