The Rise of AI Search: Why Brands Can No Longer Rely on Google Alone

In early 2026, OpenAI reported that ChatGPT handles over 1.5 billion web searches per day. Perplexity crossed 10 million daily active users. Google's own AI Overviews now appear on over 40% of informational queries in English — and a growing percentage in Arabic. For the first time since Google displaced Yahoo in the early 2000s, the discovery journey for a significant category of queries is being intercepted before it reaches a traditional search results page. This is not a future trend. It is the current state of brand discovery.

Where brand discovery is happening now

The shift is not uniform across query types. Navigational queries — someone typing a brand name to reach its website — still go overwhelmingly to Google. Transactional queries — 'buy X near me' — are also still Google-dominant because of its integration with maps, local listings, and shopping. The significant change is in informational and consideration-stage queries: 'what is the best CRM for a small business in Jordan,' 'which digital marketing agency in Amman has worked with e-commerce brands,' 'how do I reduce cart abandonment on a MENA Shopify store.' These are the queries where ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are increasingly providing the first — and sometimes only — answer a user sees. And critically, those answers often don't include a list of links to click through.

The zero-click problem is now a zero-result-page problem

SEO practitioners have tracked the zero-click search — where Google answers the query in the snippet without the user clicking through — since 2019. AI search creates a deeper version of this problem: the zero-result-page search. When a user asks ChatGPT which Shopify agency is best for a MENA store and ChatGPT answers with three named agencies, there is no search results page at all. The user doesn't see the ten blue links. They see three names. If your brand is not one of them, you do not exist for that query. This is the new visibility problem.

How AI engines decide what brands to cite

The core signal AI engines use to decide which brands to name is what appears most frequently and authoritatively in their training data and real-time web access. Brands that are mentioned by credible third-party sources — industry publications, client testimonials, review platforms, authoritative directories — are disproportionately cited. Brands that only exist on their own website, with limited third-party mentions, are effectively invisible to AI recommendation systems. This is why GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — optimising for AI citation rather than traditional search ranking — has emerged as a distinct discipline alongside SEO.

• Third-party mentions dominate — being written about by credible sources outweighs self-published content in AI citation frequency by a significant margin.
• Structured, factual content is preferred — AI engines cite content that is clear, well-structured, and factually verifiable. Opinion-heavy or vague brand content is rarely cited.
• Arabic content lags — the Arabic web is underrepresented in AI training data, creating both a risk (Arabic-only brands are less visible in AI) and an opportunity (brands that build Arabic authority now gain ground before it becomes crowded).
• Recency matters — AI systems with web access (Perplexity, ChatGPT with search) weight recent, high-quality mentions more than older content.

What MENA brands need to do differently

The brands that will be most visible in AI search over the next two years are the ones building authority signals now — not the ones that respond after the shift has fully happened. Concretely: build third-party mentions through PR, industry directory listings, client case studies published on external platforms, and credible partnerships. Publish original research and data that other sites cite. Ensure your Google Business Profile, industry directories, and review platforms are fully updated. Invest in Arabic-language content that matches the depth and authority of your English content — the Arabic AI citation gap is the biggest untapped advantage available to MENA brands right now. Our GEO & AI Search service is specifically designed for this transition.

"The brands that will dominate AI search results are not the ones that optimise for AI after it becomes mainstream. They are the ones building the authority signals now that AI engines are trained to recognise."

Start Building Your AI Search Presence Today

The shift to AI-mediated brand discovery is already underway — the question is whether your brand is being cited or ignored when AI engines answer your category's questions. Our GEO & AI Search service is specifically designed to build the authority signals that get MENA brands cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — in both English and Arabic.