How to get cited by ChatGPT and AI search in Dubai

To get cited by ChatGPT and other AI search tools in Dubai, let their search crawlers in, then publish pages that answer a buyer's question in the first two sentences with a real price, a real city and a named person behind them. Nobody can promise a citation, including me, because the tools do not publish how they pick sources. What I can show you is what worked on my own site.

Between mid September and mid October 2026 more than four paying clients came to me from ChatGPT. In the same 28 days Google sent my site between one and three clicks. I did not plan that split. It is the reason I stopped treating AI search as a curiosity and started treating it as the lead channel.

What is GEO, and is it different from SEO?

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the work of making your pages easy for AI tools to find, read and quote. Google's own position is that it is still SEO: its guide to AI features says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for AI Overviews or AI Mode.

That is Google's view of Google. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are separate products with separate crawlers and no equivalent rulebook. So I treat GEO as ordinary SEO plus a short list of things the other tools care about, which is what the rest of this article covers.

How does ChatGPT choose which pages to cite?

I don't know, and nobody outside OpenAI does. OpenAI does not publish a ranking formula for ChatGPT search. What it does document is the gate: sites that are opted out of its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and a change to robots.txt can take around 24 hours to be picked up.

Everything after the gate is inference. From watching my own pages, the ones that got quoted were the ones that stated a plain answer early, named the city and the price, and did not make the reader hunt. That is an observation from one small site, not a rule, and I would not build a strategy on a sample this size without checking it on yours.

Which AI crawlers should I let in?

The names are confusing because each company runs several bots with different jobs. Here is what the companies' own documentation says each one does:

• OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI): surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. This is the one that decides whether you can appear in ChatGPT search answers.
• GPTBot (OpenAI): crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI models. Disallowing it signals you do not want training use. It is not the search gate.
• ChatGPT-User (OpenAI): visits pages when a person asks ChatGPT to. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to it, because a user triggered the visit.
• Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Anthropic): search indexing and live fetches when someone asks Claude a question. Blocking them can reduce your visibility in Claude's answers.
• ClaudeBot (Anthropic): collects content that could be used for training. It is not the citation crawler.
• PerplexityBot (Perplexity): surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results. Perplexity-User handles user-triggered fetches and generally ignores robots.txt.

My robots.txt allows all of them. That is a choice, not a default. If you would rather keep training crawlers out and still appear in search answers, the documentation lets you allow the search bots and disallow the training ones separately.

Could my site be blocking AI crawlers without my knowing?

Yes, and it is the first thing I would check. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and read it. Cloudflare's managed robots.txt is an opt-in setting, per its documentation, and when it is on it prepends Disallow rules for known AI crawlers. Its own example file lists GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended, among others. I could not see Cloudflare's full list, so I cannot tell you whether OAI-SearchBot is in it on your account. Read the live file instead of guessing.

Cloudflare also says robots.txt compliance is voluntary and that its AI Crawl Control tool is what enforces allow and block rules per crawler. If someone set up your hosting or security a year ago, ask them which of the two is switched on.

What kind of page gets quoted?

A page that answers before it introduces itself. Mine open with the answer, including the service, the city and the price, in the first two sentences. The reasoning is simple. An AI tool pulling a passage wants something that still makes sense with nothing around it, and a first paragraph that says 'welcome to our company' makes sense to nobody.

• Make the first two sentences a complete answer: what it is, where, and what it costs.
• Write each H2 as the question a buyer would type, and put a short, self-contained answer directly under it.
• Publish prices. A page that says 'contact us for a quote' gives an AI tool nothing to quote, and gives a buyer a reason to ask someone else.
• Say who is behind it. A named person with a real track record is easier to trust than a company page.
• Add a short FAQ with real questions from real customers, not questions you wish they asked.

For the record, here is what I publish on this topic: SEO work starts at AED 3,500 one-off for a one-off Technical Sprint, or AED 2,500/mo for Foundation, with a three-month minimum on the monthly plan. None of it promises a ranking or a citation, because I can't deliver one.

Do llms.txt and FAQ markup help?

I have both, and I can't prove either one helps. Google says Search ignores llms.txt files and that you do not need special AI files or markup to appear in its AI features. It is harmless to keep for other services, but I have no evidence it changes whether ChatGPT cites you.

FAQ markup is the same story with a twist. My pages carry FAQPage structured data, but Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search from 7 May 2026, so there is no Google reward for it. Whether ChatGPT reads it, I don't know. I keep the visible FAQ because readers use it, and the markup because it costs nothing.

What happens when I change a page that was being cited?

It can stop being cited for a while. I rewrote one page that ChatGPT had been quoting, and it dropped out of the answers for about a week until the crawler came back and read the new version. I can't say whether the new text was worse or simply unread. The lesson was to change cited pages carefully, and to keep a list of them.

That is also why monitoring matters. Once a week, ask ChatGPT the five questions your best customers actually ask, and write down whether you are named and which page it links. A spreadsheet is enough. I also search my own business name and read what comes back. I don't know how much weight any AI tool gives reviews, but it is the first thing a buyer will see.

A checklist for Dubai businesses

• Read your live robots.txt and confirm OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are not disallowed.
• Check whether Cloudflare's managed robots.txt or AI Crawl Control is on, and what it blocks.
• Make sure your key pages are indexable in Google, since AI Overviews only draw on indexed pages.
• Rewrite the first two sentences of each service page as a direct answer with service, city and price.
• Turn H2s into the questions customers ask, with a short answer under each.
• Publish real prices and say what they exclude.
• Keep your Google Business Profile accurate. Google's own guide lists accurate business data as part of what matters.
• Test five buyer questions in ChatGPT each week and log what it cites.
• Do not edit a page that is being cited without noting the date, so you can link a drop to a change.