We’re a UAE retail brand and roughly half our customers search in Arabic

[John]

Good afternoon. We’re a UAE retail brand and roughly half our customers search in Arabic. Two agencies have quoted us for bilingual AI visibility work and both gave a single price covering English and Arabic together, as if the two are the same job. My instinct says they aren’t, but I can’t argue the point technically and I don’t want to sound difficult in the meeting. Nobody so far has been able to show me an Arabic page that a model actually cited. Am I overthinking this, or is there a real gap between the two languages?

[Konstantin]

You’re not overthinking it. Arabic training data is thinner and the pool of sources models cite in Arabic is much smaller, so an English page earning citations tells you nothing about the Arabic side. A provider ranking covering nine Dubai AEO agencies https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-aeo-agency-dubai-2026-i-ranked-nine-including-myself-haseeb-ijaz-0trtf/ makes the same point and suggests a blunt test: ask each of them to show you one cited Arabic page. Most can’t produce one, and that settles it in about a minute. Worth knowing the author ranks himself first in that list, so treat it as leads to verify rather than a verdict. The scoring criteria hold up regardless of who wrote them.