AI Search in Arabic: how Gulf and Egyptian brands get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google

Cover and inside pages of AI Search in Arabic
  • 37Pages
  • 4Chapters
  • 37Sources
Choose your edition:Englishالعربية
Free guide

Get your copy of AI Search in Arabic.

37 A4 pages with a 10-question test you can run tonight, our check of 19 brand sites in the region, a 90-day plan and two checklists. Free. We also email you the link so you can share it with your team.

0.6% of websites whose language is known are in Arabic. When an assistant cannot find your answer in Arabic, it writes one from someone else’s pages.

The guide in brief

Our short answer

Most Arabic AI problems are not language problems. They are delivery, structure and consistency problems that hit the Arabic site harder: text built by JavaScript that AI crawlers cannot read, structured data in English only, and facts that differ between the two languages.

So treat AI answers as a channel with its own numbers. Measure how often you are named in Arabic, fix what bots cannot read, ground the assistants in approved Arabic facts, and repeat every month. The guide sets out the loop, the tools and a 90-day plan, with the evidence for each step.

  • 51%of B2B software buyers start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, against 29% in G2’s 2025 report
  • 66%of Saudi consumers aged 18 to 50 use AI tools, up from 49% a year earlier (Deloitte, May 2026)
  • 16 of 19brand sites in our check of the region have no structured data written in Arabic
  • 0.6%of websites whose language is known are in Arabic (W3Techs)
Chapter by chapter

What each chapter concludes

  1. The shift

    Discovery moved from ten blue links to one written answer. In the Gulf that answer is written in two languages, and the Arabic one is the weaker.

    If you only read one thingIn a December 2024 study, the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity did not run JavaScript, so they missed any text a site builds in the browser.

  2. What breaks in Arabic

    Seven failure points, the name problem, and what we found when we checked the Arabic pages of 19 large consumer brands in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt.

    If you only read one thingCheck the raw HTML of your Arabic home page. If the Arabic words are not in it, no crawler that skips JavaScript will ever read them.

  3. The platform

    Measure, serve, ground, create, connect: how SitecoreAI, Scrunch and Salesforce fit one loop, including what Scrunch launched in Symposium week and what was only shown on stage.

    If you only read one thingStart with measurement. Until you can see how often you are named in Arabic, every fix is a guess.

  4. The playbook

    A 90-day plan, seven numbers to track, who owns what across seven teams, and two checklists to hand to your web and marketing teams.

    If you only read one thingName one owner for AI visibility across both languages. In our experience, split ownership is the most common reason Arabic falls behind.

Summarized from AI Search in Arabic, an Arcsen guide, 37 pages, November 2026. Every figure in the full guide has a numbered source, checked on 12 November 2026.

Quick answers

Questions this guide answers

Why do AI assistants describe some brands worse in Arabic than in English?
The Arabic web is small next to the number of people who read it: 0.6% of websites whose language is known are in Arabic. With less Arabic text to draw on, assistants lean on English pages, aggregators and forums when they answer in Arabic, and a brand’s own Arabic pages are often thinner or harder for bots to read.
Can AI crawlers read Arabic text that is built with JavaScript?
Often not. In a December 2024 study by Vercel and MERJ, the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity did not render JavaScript; Gemini, through Googlebot, and Applebot did. If your Arabic text appears only after scripts run in the browser, most AI crawlers cannot use it.
What is the most common gap on Arabic brand sites?
In our November 2026 check of the Arabic pages of 19 large consumer brands in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, 16 had no structured data written in Arabic. Nine had no Arabic hreflang, and six had a canonical tag that was missing or pointed elsewhere.
Can Scrunch track prompts in Arabic?
Yes. Scrunch accepts prompts in any language and supports country-level location, so the same question can be tracked in English, Modern Standard Arabic and dialect, market by market. Check that your plan covers each country you need.
What did Scrunch launch in Sitecore Symposium week 2026?
Citation Optimization, launched on 12 November 2026, finds the third-party pages AI answers cite for each prompt you track and drafts outreach from your approved information. Its companion, Imposter Detection, flags suspected impostor sites. Sitecore announced MarketingIQ on 11 November to draft and stage fixes from Scrunch findings for a person to approve.
Do I need SitecoreAI to start?
No. Scrunch works as a standalone platform with any tech stack, and it also runs inside SitecoreAI. Three weeks of Arabic measurement give you a baseline to plan from.
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Written for

Who it is for

CMOs and heads of digital

Who own the brand, the website and the budget for being found, in Arabic and in English.

Brand, content and Arabic editorial leads

Who decide what the assistants can quote, and who hear how customers really ask.

IT, web and security teams

Who run the CDN, the firewall rules and the page templates that decide what bots can read.

Cover of Arabic First
Also free: Arabic FirstThe bilingual SitecoreAI playbook for Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.
The Arabic edition: البحث بالذكاء الاصطناعي بالعربيةThe same guide, written in Arabic for teams who work in Arabic.

From Arcsen’s Sitecore practice: a Sitecore partner and a Salesforce Summit partner with teams in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai, Doha and Cairo.