How to choose an AI SEO agency in the UAE

You can stop reading most AI SEO proposals at the line that promises citations. Nobody can guarantee a mention in ChatGPT or an AI Overview. Answers are written fresh for each question, and Google names two conditions for its AI features, indexing and snippet eligibility, neither of which an agency controls. The rest of the proposal then tells you what you're really buying.

The label hides a second problem. "AI SEO" means two things, getting your business cited in AI answers and using AI to produce SEO work faster, and a proposal can sell the first while delivering the second. What AI SEO means separates them. This post is about buying the first, with a warning about the second.

Which promises should end the conversation?

Which seven questions separate real work from vocabulary?

Which kind of AI SEO are you selling?

A good agency separates work that gets you cited from AI-assisted production, and tells you which one the price covers. A bad answer is "both, in one platform", because it means nobody has decided what you're paying for.

What will you change on my site in the first month?

Real answers name pages and fixes: indexing problems, snippet settings, a robots.txt rule, facts that disagree between your site and your listings. A bad answer names a tool to install. Work that starts with a subscription instead of an audit is selling the subscription.

How is your score calculated, and can you run it by hand on one question?

Ask them to do it in front of you. A good answer shows the prompt, the engine, the date, the raw answer and what counted as a mention, and you could repeat it yourself. A bad answer is "it's proprietary".

Who writes and approves the claims on my pages, in English and in Arabic?

You want a named person on your side and a named writer on theirs. We work in English and Arabic with native Arabic writers and never machine-translate. A bad answer is drafts published without anyone you can name having read them, or Arabic produced by translation.

In regulated sectors this question carries weight. The Dubai Health Authority's social media advertising standard (issued in 2022) bars absolute or exaggerated claims such as "best", "safest" and "100%", and copy written to sound authoritative can slip them in. AI search for clinics goes into the detail.

Where do you use AI in your own work, and who reviews it?

Google's guidance on AI content has two halves. Quality is what counts, not the tool that produced the page, and AI used mainly to manipulate rankings breaches its spam policies. Does Google penalise AI content? covers the policy.

A good agency can say where AI helps and where a person decides. We use AI in our own workflows and say so. A bad answer is evasion, or "it's all automated".

What will the monthly report contain, and can I see the raw answers?

A useful report lists the fixed question list, what each assistant said, whether you were named, whether it was accurate, which of your pages were linked, plus indexing status and enquiries by source. A bad report is one number going up. What a monthly agency report should show has the longer version.

Who owns the accounts, files and content, and what happens if I leave?

Ad accounts, pages and files should sit in your name from day one, and the notice period should be in writing. Ask whether the quote is before or after VAT. The Ministry of Finance says UAE VAT has applied since 1 January 2018 at a standard rate of 5%, and your accountant should confirm how it applies to agency fees. A bad answer is any arrangement where leaving means losing your assets.

What does the work look like when it's real?

1. 01An audit of access and indexing: robots.txt, which pages Google has indexed, snippet settings, and whether prices and services are text a machine can read.
2. 02A fix list for facts: one description of the business, consistent names in English and Arabic, matching listings, and published prices with a checked-on date.
3. 03Rewrites of the pages that earn revenue, with the answer first and a source on every figure.
4. 04A baseline run of a fixed prompt list in two languages, taken before any change so there's something to compare against.
5. 05A monthly report and a monthly fix list, built from the raw answers and not from a score.

We publish SEO timing as movement for most sites in 3 to 4 months, with 6 to 12 for competitive terms. AI answers rest on the same pages, so be wary of a promise to beat that timetable. The checklist behind this sequence lets you run the first stages yourself.

When should you not hire anyone for this?

When your key pages aren't indexed, when nobody inside the business will own the facts, or when what you want is a guarantee. In the first case the access and facts checks cost an afternoon, not a retainer. In the second, no agency can know your current prices. In the third, you're asking for something nobody can sell, and an agency that agrees has told you how it treats promises.

On price, most of our monthly services start from AED 12,000 a month, excluding VAT, priced on scope, and the published figures are on the pricing page. Our own SEO service includes AI search visibility, and we'd rather tell you to run the access and facts checks yourself than sell you a retainer that restates them.

In our view, a retainer under about AED 5,000 a month can't pay for a competent UAE marketer's time, so it's either junior work with little oversight or a template. That holds for an AI SEO agency in Dubai as much as for any other.

Send every agency on your shortlist the same seven questions in writing and compare the answers line by line. The vague ones sort themselves to the bottom.