Questions to ask when selecting a GEO agency Dubai partner

Question one: can you show me my current AI visibility?

This is the single most revealing question you can ask. A capable agency should be able to run three or four real buyer prompts against your category live on the call — "best [category] in Dubai," "[you] vs [competitor]" — and show you exactly how ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini currently answer. If they can only speak in generalities about "AI visibility trends," they haven't tested your specific situation, and any pricing or timeline they quote afterward is a guess dressed up as a proposal.

Suggesting.ai builds this diagnostic into a free 48-hour audit precisely because it removes the guesswork on both sides — the agency knows the real gap before quoting, and you know exactly what you're buying.

Watch for agencies that answer this question with a case study from a different market instead of testing your actual brand — a screenshot from a US client tells you nothing about how your Dubai-specific category currently appears, and it's a common way to sidestep a question the agency can't yet answer.

Question two: how do you separate GEO from ChatGPT Ads?

Organic generative engine optimization and paid ChatGPT Ads are different disciplines with different budgets, timelines and risk profiles. An agency that blends both into one vague "AI marketing" retainer, without separate line items and separate reporting, makes it impossible to know which part of your spend is actually working.

• Ask for separate monthly reports: citation frequency for organic GEO, cost per qualified click for paid Ads.
• Ask whether ChatGPT Ads are even available yet in your target market — the rollout is expanding country by country under OpenAI's Ads Manager, not universal.
• Ask what the minimum viable organic GEO investment looks like before paid spend is even recommended.

It's also worth asking directly which market ChatGPT Ads currently covers, since availability is expanding country by country under OpenAI's Ads Manager rather than launching everywhere at once — an agency quoting a fixed paid-media budget without confirming this hasn't checked the basics.

Question three: has crawler access been checked?

Before any content strategy is proposed, ask whether the agency has verified that OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can actually reach your site. A robots.txt written years ago for an unrelated reason can silently block all of them, making even excellent content invisible to the engines you're trying to be cited by.

This is a five-minute technical check that should happen before any content is commissioned — an agency that skips straight to a content calendar without it is building on an unverified foundation.

Ask to see the actual robots.txt output, not just a verbal assurance that 'it's fine' — a five-minute look at the raw file is enough to confirm whether OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are explicitly allowed or simply never mentioned, which functions as a block either way.

Question four: how will results be measured monthly?

Ask for the exact metrics: citation frequency by engine, share of voice against three named competitors on a fixed set of tracked prompts, and — for regulated or high-ticket categories like a Dubai brokerage or corporate advisory — how claims like licensing and fee structure are kept current so models keep citing them accurately.

Studies on AI-referred traffic report notably higher conversion than average organic Google traffic, so ask how that referral quality specifically gets tracked, not just cited as a general statistic in a sales deck.

Also ask what happens if a tracked prompt's answer changes for reasons outside the agency's control — a competitor launches a major campaign, or a model update shifts sourcing behavior. A credible agency explains how it adapts rather than promising a fixed trajectory.

What Suggesting.ai does differently in Dubai

Suggesting.ai's free 48-hour audit is built to answer all four questions before a contract is discussed: current AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, a crawler-access review, and a scoped plan separating organic GEO from paid ChatGPT Ads where the market supports it. Because its own client roster spans regulated finance media — brokers, trading platforms, fintech comparison sites — the same rigor around precise, current, verifiable facts applies to whatever industry a Dubai client operates in.

The audit exists so the first real conversation with a client starts from evidence, not a generic pitch deck.

For a Dubai-based B2B or finance brand specifically, this also means the audit accounts for both English and Arabic buyer prompts, since a firm cited accurately in one language but missing in the other is only half-visible to its actual market.

The audit is deliberately structured as a diagnostic document you could hand to a competing agency for a second opinion, not a sales artifact designed to only make one case — if the findings hold up under scrutiny, the retainer conversation that follows is grounded in fact rather than persuasion.