The four parts of AI search work, and which two a UAE company should own rather than buy
Split the work into four parts first. Two are worth owning, one is worth buying, and one should never be bought as a retainer.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026
The decision is usually framed as training against outsourcing, which produces a bad answer because the work is not one thing. Split it into four parts and each part answers for itself. For most UAE companies the result is a mix, with the expensive mistake being to buy the part you should own and own the part you should buy.
The four parts of this work
| Part | Own or buy | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Deciding which buyer questions matter | Own | Only you know what your buyers ask and what a good enquiry looks like |
| Taking the readings and keeping the record | Buy | It is repetitive, it has to be identical every month, and it is cheap as a subscription |
| Writing and publishing the pages | Either | Depends on whether you have somebody who can write and somebody who can deploy |
| One off strategy | Neither as a retainer | It is a project with an end, and on a monthly fee it becomes permanent discovery |
Why the question set is the part to own
Everything downstream depends on it. The questions decide what you measure, which decides what you fix. An outside supplier will write a competent generic list; only somebody inside your business knows that your buyers ask about delivery to a particular emirate, or about a licence, or about a specific comparison that embarrasses your main rival.
This is an afternoon of work, not a skill to train for. Sit down with whoever answers enquiries and write the twenty questions they actually hear, in the words they hear them in. That document is the asset.
Why the reading is the part to buy
It has to be the same questions, the same engines and the same method every month, or the comparison is worthless. Humans are bad at that and it is the easiest thing to buy cheaply. Two practical reasons from our own reading of this market.
On 22 October 2026 we put a 198 question set of UAE buying questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, with the market fixed inside the prompt because the gl, hl and location parameters are accepted by the search API and then ignored. Of the 60 blind readings, ChatGPT carried 2,729 of the 2,812 citation URLs and Gemini carried 83, with 9 of its 28 readings carrying none at all. And 34 of the 60 named no supplier whatsoever.
So a manual check done by a person will see wildly different amounts of evidence depending on which app they happened to open, and will frequently see an answer with nobody in it and conclude the check failed. A standing record across engines, with each one reported separately, avoids both.
What training your own team actually means here
Three skills, and only one of them is new.
- Writing a page that answers a question. Not new, and most marketing teams have it or can hire it.
- Reading a reading. New, and it takes an hour to teach. The core of it is that cited and named are two different results, and that any reading where the question named your business measures the ceiling rather than your position.
- Shipping a change to the site. Not new and frequently the real constraint. In this market the commonest reason a programme stalls is that nobody internally can deploy a page.
If your team has the first and third, you do not need to buy the writing. If it has neither, buying the writing is cheaper than hiring for it until you know the work pays.
The talent question, answered honestly
This skill set is thin in the regional market because the category is new everywhere, and we are not going to publish a number about hiring difficulty that we have not measured. What we can say from our own reading is that the batch on marketing talent and tooling named global software vendors in both engines and no local specialist, which tells you something about how young the local supplier market for this work is.
The practical consequence for a UAE company is that buying the capability in is currently easier than hiring it, and that the balance will shift as the category matures. Build the question set now, because that asset keeps its value whichever way you go later.
What UAE companies ask about building this capability
Can one person do all of it? One person can own the question set, read the monthly record and brief the pages. They cannot also take the readings reliably and write everything, which is the point at which something gets bought.
Should we send somebody on a course? A course teaches the vocabulary. The useful training is one hour on reading your own first monthly record, with somebody who has read a hundred of them.
Is this a job title yet? It is becoming one and it does not need to be in your company. Attach it to whoever already owns search and content, with the question set as their asset.
What if our agency says it covers this? Ask for a saved reading with the market inside the prompt, the engine named and the date attached. If the market was set with a parameter, it is not a UAE reading. That one question separates suppliers quickly.
Does the Arabic side change the build or buy answer? It changes the writing half rather than the reading half. If you publish in Arabic, the person approving a factual claim has to read Arabic, and that is a staffing requirement rather than a training one. The question set itself should exist in both languages if your buyers ask in both, and writing it twice is still an afternoon.
How much time does the monthly cycle take internally? An hour to read the record and decide, plus whatever the resulting changes take. The reading itself should not be costing you internal time, which is the whole argument for buying that part.
The part we do, and the part we would leave with you
We would not sell you the question set. It is yours, it is an afternoon, and it is the asset. What AI Knows Us does is the repetitive half: the same questions read every month across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with each engine reported separately, citation and naming kept as two columns, and any reading where the question named you excluded as a ceiling measurement. For a buyer in the United Arab Emirates the plan that reads all five engines is 199 dollars a month, the price outside the United States and the United Kingdom, read from aiknowsus.com on 22 October 2026.
If the open question is which supplier to buy the publishing half from, our page on how to select an SEO company in the UAE sets out the selection process and the contract terms worth specifying.