MENA AI Visibility Report 2025
How Arabic brands rank inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — with benchmarks by industry across 5 MENA markets. Research report by the Zaher Research Team, March 2026.
What the data shows
- The language gap is structural, not linguistic — brands with identical products but stronger English-language web infrastructure consistently outranked Arabic-first competitors. Language quality wasn't the differentiator; schema markup and citation depth were.
- Schema markup creates a 4× visibility multiplier — brands with properly implemented bilingual Organization and LocalBusiness schema appeared in AI answers 4.2× more often than those without. This is the single highest-ROI technical fix available to MENA brands today.
- E-commerce leads the recovery — among the brands that improved their AI visibility over the past 12 months, 61% were e-commerce companies, primarily because their product catalog data was already structured in machine-readable formats.
- Perplexity is more citation-friendly than ChatGPT — across all categories tested, MENA brands appeared 2.3× more often in Perplexity responses than in ChatGPT.
- Financial services has the worst gap and the most to gain — only an 8% citation rate for Arabic-first financial brands vs. 39% for multinationals in the same markets.
- AI query adoption in MENA grew 340% year over year in 2025 — brands building visibility infrastructure now will be 12–18 months ahead of those who wait.
How we ran the study
500 queries generated across 12 industries, in both Arabic and English, simulating real consumer discovery intent — not branded queries. Each query was run live across ChatGPT (GPT-4o), Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Perplexity, with outputs logged and parsed for brand mentions, citation links, and answer positioning.
Zaher Research Team
This report was produced by Zaher's in-house AI research team — specialists in GEO, Arabic NLP, and MENA market dynamics. The research draws on Zaher's proprietary query infrastructure used across 500+ live brand audits.
Get the full report — free, no credit card
Includes all 12 industry benchmarks, per-market breakdowns for all 5 MENA markets, and the full GEO fix checklist used by brands who reversed their visibility gap. 18 pages, 6 data sections.