"Can you guarantee we will be number one on ChatGPT?" A conversation we have every week

The question

It comes about four minutes into the first call, after the pleasantries and before anyone has shared a screen. The owner of a business in Dubai, a clinic or a brokerage or a trading company, leans slightly towards the camera and asks it plainly.

"Can you guarantee we will be number one on ChatGPT?"

It is a fair question. Everyone selling this service in Dubai is making some version of that promise, and the owner has probably had three proposals that said yes. Our answer is no, and the rest of the call is about why that no is the answer worth paying for.

What we say first

We ask them to open ChatGPT on their phone, right then, and type a question about their own sector. "Best dermatologist in Dubai Marina," say. They read out the names. Then we ask them to type the same question with one word changed: "good dermatologist in Dubai Marina." The list changes. Then "dermatologist near me," with location on. It changes again. Then we ask them to log out and try once more.

By the fourth try the point has made itself. There is no number one. There is a set of businesses the engine considers credible for that kind of question, and it draws from the set differently every time. Our job is to get a client into the set and keep them there, for as many of the questions their buyers ask as possible. Anyone who promises a fixed position is promising something the engine does not have.

What they say next

Usually one of two things. "So how do I know it is working?" or "The other agency said they could do it in five days."

On the first: we show them our own log. Thirty questions about AEO in Dubai, five engines, one row per week, starting from the week we were not named anywhere. They can see the first appearance in Perplexity in week three, ChatGPT search in week four, the week Gemini caught up after the Google Business Profile reviews came in. They can see which sources each engine cited in each answer, which is the column that tells us what to do next. We tell them they will get the same log for their business, every week, and that they can run any of the prompts themselves at any time to check us.

On the second: we say the five-day agency may well be able to show them an answer with their name in it on day five. Ask for the exact prompt. It will be a question so specific that nobody else is competing for it, or it will have been run on an account that has been fed the client's name repeatedly. Neither puts a single customer in front of them. Then we ask what the agency promised to do in week six, and the call usually goes quiet.

The part where it gets uncomfortable

At some point the owner asks the question underneath the question. "Then why should I pay you at all, if you cannot promise the result?"

This is the right question, and we answer it directly. They are paying for four things. The work: identity cleaned up across every platform, pages rebuilt so the engines can quote them, profiles on the sources the engines trust, content that answers what their buyers actually ask. The measurement: a weekly log they can verify themselves. The judgement: knowing which questions are winnable now and which are a year away, so the first month produces something visible rather than a report. And the honesty: when something does not move, we say so and say why, instead of changing the prompt until it does.

We also tell them what we will not do, because it matters as much. We will not write fake reviews. We will not stuff their name into pages that have nothing to do with their business. We will not publish five hundred articles nobody reads. All three can produce a screenshot and all three get a business discounted by the engines within months.

How the call ends

About a third of the time the owner thanks us and goes with the agency that said yes. That is fine. Some of them come back in three months with a folder of screenshots that did not turn into enquiries.

The rest ask what the first month looks like. We walk them through it: the audit, which tells them exactly where they stand before any money is spent on fixing it; the entity work, which is boring and decisive; the first ten pages; the first appearances, usually in week three or four for specific questions. We tell them the price, which is on our website, and the term, which is one, two or three months with nothing renewing on its own.

Then we ask them to do one thing before signing anything: run the same three prompts again a week later and note whether the list has changed. It will have. That is the whole argument, made by the engine itself.

Why we wrote this down

Because the question is not going away, and because the honest answer is a competitive advantage in a market where everyone else is saying yes. A business owner in Dubai who understands that AI answers are a set, not a ranking, makes better decisions about who to hire and what to expect. If that owner hires us, good. If they hire someone else with better questions than they had before, we have still done our job.