Five years ago, if someone wanted to find a restaurant, compare software, or research a product, they opened Google. Today, that same person might ask ChatGPT, scroll TikTok, search within Reddit, check YouTube, or type their question into Perplexity before Google even crosses their mind. The way people look for information has splintered across platforms, and most businesses are still writing content as if Google is the only door to their website. That blind spot is costing them visibility in places where their customers are actively looking. ‘Search everywhere optimization is the term people use for this shift, and the idea is simple: stop treating Google as the only place your content needs to rank. infiniX360, an SEO agency in Dubai that has been working in this market for over a decade, has been helping brands in the UAE figure out which platforms actually matter for their audience and how to show up on each one.
How Search Behaviour Has Fractured
Google still handles billions of queries a day, but its share of how people discover information is shrinking. Younger audiences in particular have moved their research habits to platforms that Google does not control. A 2024 report from Google itself acknowledged that nearly 40 percent of Gen Z users prefer searching on TikTok or Instagram over Google for things like restaurant recommendations, travel ideas, and product reviews.
Then there is the rise of AI-powered search tools. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s own AI-generated panels are answering questions directly instead of linking out to websites. When someone asks Perplexity, “What’s the best CRM for small businesses in Dubai? they get a synthesised answer with cited sources, not a list of ten blue links. If your brand is not among the sources that AI tools pull from, you are invisible to a growing segment of searchers.
This is why modern search optimisation has to account for more than just Google rankings. Your content needs to be structured, distributed, and optimised for every platform where your audience goes looking for answers.
What ‘Search Everywhere’ Optimisation Actually Means
Think of it less as a tactic and more as a question you keep asking: where are my customers actually looking for what I sell? The answer used to be Google, full stop. Now it could be YouTube for how-to queries, LinkedIn for B2B research, Reddit for unfiltered product opinions, TikTok for quick visual answers, or ChatGPT for someone who wants a direct recommendation without scrolling through ten links. Content discoverability depends on showing up in whichever of those places your specific audience uses, not all of them at once.
That does not mean spreading yourself thin across every platform. It means picking the three or four that matter for your market and creating content that fits how each one works. A real estate company in Dubai might get more leads from a well-optimized YouTube walkthrough than from a blog post that ranks third on Google, while a SaaS company might find that a detailed LinkedIn article brings in better prospects than a TikTok ever could. The point is to match the platform to the audience, rather than treating every channel like a copy-paste job.
Brand discoverability now means your content has to work differently in each place. A blog post structured for Google rankings is not the same as a Reddit comment that earns upvotes, and neither of those looks like the kind of answer ChatGPT would cite. Adapting to those differences is the whole game.
Why Traditional SEO Alone Is No Longer Enough
Traditional SEO remains valuable, but treating it as your only content discoverability channel is like running ads on one TV station and assuming you have reached the whole country. Several shifts have made a Google-only approach risky:
- Google’s own AI-generated answer panels now sit above organic results for a growing number of queries, which means even a page-one ranking does not guarantee the click-through rate it did two years ago.
- Platforms like Reddit and Quora are appearing in Google results more frequently, often outranking brand websites for informational queries because Google now values community-sourced answers more heavily.
- AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are pulling users away from traditional search entirely, answering questions with cited sources before anyone visits a website.
An LLM SEO strategy accounts for all of this by making sure your content is not just rankable by Google’s algorithm but also citable by the large language models powering AI search. That means writing with clear, direct answers near the top of each section, citing your own original research, and publishing on platforms that AI tools are known to pull from.
The brands that treat SEO as one part of a broader modern search optimisation plan will outlast the ones that keep pouring everything into Google rankings alone.
GEO Strategies for AI Search Engines
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of making your content more likely to be cited by AI-powered search tools when they assemble answers. It overlaps with traditional SEO in many ways, but a few specifics matter more in the AI context:
- State facts early and clearly rather than building up to an answer over several paragraphs. If someone asks, “How much does company registration cost in the UAE?”, the page that opens with a direct number and a brief explanation gets cited before one that starts with three paragraphs of background.
- Publish original data whenever possible, whether that is a survey, a case study with real numbers, or a proprietary benchmark report. AI tools prioritise unique information because pages restating widely available facts in slightly different words have less value to a model that has already seen the same content from dozens of sources.
- Pay attention to where AI tools source their information from. ChatGPT and Perplexity both tend to pull from well-structured blog posts, Wikipedia, industry publications, and platforms with strong domain authority, so publishing on those surfaces or earning mentions from them increases your chances of being referenced.
An LLM SEO strategy ties all of this together by treating AI citability as a goal that sits alongside traditional rankings rather than replacing them.
Building a Brand That Gets Found Everywhere
Start by mapping where your customers actually search. Run surveys, check your referral traffic sources, and look at which platforms are sending leads versus which ones you have been ignoring. Then build a content plan that covers the platforms that matter most, formatted for each one specifically rather than copy-pasted across all of them.
Optimising for search across platforms is not about doing more but about distributing smarter and making sure the content you already produce reaches the places where people are actually looking. Brand discoverability now depends on showing up across platforms that did not exist or did not matter five years ago, and the businesses that figure this out first will have a hard-to-close head start.
infiniX360, an SEO company in Sharjah and Dubai with over a decade of experience across the UAE market, works with brands that want to move beyond Google-only strategies and build real visibility across the platforms their customers use every day.