Does Your Website Clearly Explain Who You Are and What You Do?

Your website almost certainly explains what you sell. Explaining who you are is a different job. It is done when eighteen facts are on the page as text, written one way, and matching what your business profile and your directory listings say. Those facts run from your legal name and your price to your opening hours and the software you work with. We checked twenty UAE company websites that AI answers had pointed to, and all twenty named their services and a city or emirate. Nine of the twenty stated any price. Seven stated their opening hours.

The short version: an answer can only repeat a fact that exists somewhere as text. Eighteen facts are worth writing down. They are numbered further down this piece, and they come as a spreadsheet you can fill in, published free with this article. Get them on the page, then make your website, your business profile and your directory listings say the same thing. None of that obliges anybody to quote you. It makes the correct version available when they do.

What an AI answer quotes about a company

An AI answer quotes published specifics: price, regulator status, how long a firm has traded, the software it works with, who it says it serves, its third-party review record, its address and how it charges. When an assistant has to tell two firms apart, it reaches for those rather than adjectives. In our own runs in September 2026, across five completed answers on two UAE accounting questions in ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode, the material the answers carried about individual firms was consistent in kind:

• Price, quoted with numbers. One answer gave a firm's monthly plans in dirhams and the plan names. Another warned against packages priced in a stated band and gave a wider band instead, attributing both to a forum thread and not to any firm.
• Regulator status, in the firm's own terms. The Federal Tax Authority came up three times: "It states that it is an FTA-approved tax agency" in one answer, "is an FTA-registered tax agent" in another, and in a third a tax agency licence number quoted in full.
• Tenure. "It has operated since 1985".
• The software a firm supports. One answer listed it by name, because a buyer already running one of those systems is looking for somebody who uses it.
• Who a firm says it is for. One described a firm as "explicitly aimed at businesses ranging from startups and small businesses upward".
• Third-party review records. These come from listings and directories, not from the company, which is the one item here you cannot put on your own site. It is also why the directories belong in the consistency check further down.
• Location. Google's first answer gave a district and the name of the building.
• How a firm charges. Quoted where the firm had said it: "its tax-agent work uses a fixed-fee structure with advisory included".

Nothing in that list is a claim about quality. Every item is a fact somebody had written down somewhere, in a form that could be lifted.

The twenty sites we checked

Every one of the twenty sites named its services and a city or emirate. Only nine of the twenty stated any price, twelve a licence or regulator status, and seven their opening hours. We looked for those fields as text on each company's homepage and, where a link existed, a contact page and an about page. The method and its limits are under Method, sources and notes below.

Company information fields present as text on the twenty UAE accounting and tax company websites that AI answers cited, September 2026

The fields everybody has are the fields that separate nobody. Services and city are on every site in the sample. They tell an assistant what category you are in, and nothing about why it should name you rather than the other nineteen.

The fields the answers leaned on were missing from two in five to more than half of the same sites. Price was present on 9 sites of 20, licence or regulator status on 12, and tenure on 12. Those three were among the facts the answers used to separate one firm from another, and they are also among the fields most often absent. The sample is far too small to show that one causes the other.

Opening hours were the rarest field of all. Seven of the twenty. In a sector where nobody walks in, that is defensible. In a sector where somebody does, it is a fact a customer needs and an answer cannot supply if you have not written it down.

Machine-readable data was common but thin. Sixteen of twenty sites carried Organization or LocalBusiness markup, which is the code that labels a page as belonging to a company rather than leaving a machine to infer it. Across all the machine-readable data we found, nineteen carried a business name, fourteen a telephone and ten an address. Only nine carried the Organization or LocalBusiness label together with all three.

Machine-readable data on the twenty UAE accounting and tax company websites that AI answers cited, September 2026

Those two rows carrying ten sites are the same ten: every site that published an address in its machine-readable data also published a name and a telephone there, so the address is the field that decides it.

The limits of doing this well

Stating your facts clearly will not make an assistant mention you. Google is explicit that "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary" (Google Search Central), and OpenAI writes that "Any public website can appear in ChatGPT search" (OpenAI Help Center). Every business site starts from the same place.

Clarity changes two things: what is available to be quoted, and whether the quoted version is the one you would have chosen. If your price is not published, an answer either omits it or takes a number from somewhere else. If your founding year appears as 1997 on one page and as twenty-nine years in the market on another, both versions are in circulation and you do not control which one is repeated. That is the whole of the benefit.

What information should your website include? Eighteen facts, and how to write each one

Your website should include eighteen facts about your company. They are numbered below, and the rule for all of them is the same: as text, on a page, in one form. They group loosely into who you are, what you sell, where and when, proof, people and language, and machine-readable, but work through them as one list of eighteen, because that is how you will check them. If you only fix three this week, fix price, licence and founding year. They were all among the facts the answers used to tell firms apart, and they are three of the four most often missing. Lunasol's published process describes the same target for the page itself, "Direct answers, quotable lines, FAQ blocks and schema on every page" (Lunasol), schema being the machine-readable markup that number 17 below covers.

1. Legal name. The name on your trade licence, spelled the way the licence spells it. Put it on the site once, in the footer or on the about page.
2. Trading name. The name customers use, if it differs. State both in the same sentence, so the connection between them exists in text. A customer who asks about one and a licence that says the other is a common identity gap here.
3. What you do, in one sentence. Plain enough that a stranger could repeat it correctly. Not a slogan. If your homepage headline is a promise, put the description directly underneath it.
4. Service list. Name every service in the words a customer would use, in text on the page and not only in a dropdown menu or an image.
5. Who you serve. Company size, sector, stage. "Small businesses on mainland licences" is a fact. "Businesses of all sizes" is not.
6. City or emirate. The emirate, and the district you work from.
7. Service area. We did not measure this field, so we have no figure for it. State it anyway: which emirates you serve, and whether you work remotely. A buyer cannot tell your service area from your address.
8. Street address. Write the building, street and district out on the page. An embedded map is not an address: to anything reading your page automatically a map is a picture, and the words inside it do not count. If your contact page is a map and nothing else, type the address above it.
9. Phone. Publish one number in full international form, as text and not only inside a click-to-call button. Drop the leading zero from the code: +971 4 123 4567 for a Dubai landline, +971 50 123 4567 for a mobile. It should match the number on your business profile. If you answer on WhatsApp, say so beside it.
10. Email. A working address somebody reads, spelled out on the page. A contact form is not an email address. Use a company address, not an individual's, unless that person has agreed to it being published.
11. Opening hours. The days and times you actually work, in full. Working weeks differ between employers and between emirates here, so publish the one you keep and check that the version on your site is the version on your profile. This was the rarest field in our sample.
12. Price or pricing model. A figure, a range, a starting point, or a plain description of how you charge: hourly, fixed fee, retainer, per return, per transaction band. It was among the facts the answers quoted most often to tell firms apart, and it was on fewer than half the sites.
13. Licence or registration. Publish the number alongside the claim, once you have checked your licence conditions and your regulator's rules. In our runs, one answer quoted a firm's tax agency number in full.
14. Founding year. The year you started, written once and used everywhere. A year is more durable than a count of years, because a count goes stale and then contradicts itself.
15. Named people. At least one real person with a role, published only with that person's agreement. Eighteen of twenty sites in our sample carried a named individual. A person's name, photograph, role or direct contact details are their personal data, so ask first and give them a route to have it taken down.
16. Languages. The languages you genuinely serve customers in. In this market that sentence does real work.
17. Structured data that matches the page. Structured data is a block of machine-readable code inside the page that repeats your facts in a fixed format, so a machine does not have to work them out from your wording. You cannot see it by looking at the page. To check it, paste your homepage address into Google's Rich Results Test and read the structured data it reports for your page. You pass if that block carries your name, your address and your telephone, and all three say exactly what the visible page says. This is the one field here you probably cannot fix yourself: send the result to whoever built your site. Google's policy is blunt: "Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content", and "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page" (Google Search Central). For a local business, name and address are the required properties, with telephone, url, geo, opening hours and price range recommended (Google Search Central).
18. Tools and platforms. The software, systems and platforms you work with, named the way a customer would name them. A buyer already running one of them is looking for somebody who supports it, and one of our answers listed a firm's accounting software by name.

Whether anything reading your site automatically can reach any of this in the first place is a different question, and our article on whether AI search can access your website covers it.

Make your sources agree: name, address and phone, consistent everywhere

Your sources agree when your name, address, phone number and every other company fact read the same on your website, your business profile and every directory that lists you. That consistency has a common shorthand, NAP, for name, address and phone, and it is the work: one version of every fact, everywhere it appears. If two pages disagree, fix the older one instead of adding a third.

Your website is one of the places an answer can read about you. Your business profile is another, the directories are a third, and in our own runs the assistants drew on all three kinds. Lunasol, which owns this publication, treats this as a step of its own in its published process, working on "Entities, brand mentions, consistent facts and structured data across the sources models actually read" (Lunasol). So the test worth running is whether every place that states a fact states the same thing.

Google asks for exactly this on the name field: your name "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers". For a business with more than one location it adds that "All business locations within the same country must have the same name for all locations" (Google Business Profile Help). The same guidance forbids putting your services, your city, your phone number or a tagline into the name field, which is worth reading twice if your profile name has picked up any of them over the years.

The work is boring and nobody owns it: the website was updated in March, the profile in January, the directory entry in 2023, and each is right in its own way. Take the five places that matter most for you. For many businesses here that means the website, the business profile, the main directory in your sector, a second directory, and one social profile. Check each field against each source and mark three states rather than two: present and matching, missing, or present and different. A contradiction is worse than a gap, because a gap can only omit you and a contradiction can misinform somebody.

What is different about this in the UAE

Three things change the shape of this list here: your licensed name, your service area across the emirates, and your Arabic pages. None of them is a statement about what any authority requires or permits you to publish, which is a question for your licensing authority or your own adviser.

The licence name and the name over the door are often not spelled the same way. Where you publish the licensed name, put it in the footer or on the about page and connect it to the trading name in one sentence. The link between the two then exists in text, for a reader and for anything reading automatically.

Say which emirates you serve. Once you have confirmed your service area and whether you work remotely, write it down, because a buyer in Sharjah reading a Dubai address cannot tell.

An Arabic version is a second set of facts rather than a translation. It has its own pages and its own structured data, and it is the version a customer asking in Arabic will be answered from. We did not test Arabic pages in this survey.

One thing here is not different at all. Regulator status was among the facts the answers carried: we logged three instances of an answer describing a firm's tax agent or tax agency status in the firm's own terms, one of them a licence number quoted in full.

If your business is not a shop with a door

Four situations change how you fill the list, not what is on it.

You have no office. Home, a flexi-desk or a virtual office. Do not invent an address, and do not publish a home address you would not want visited. If you are willing to publish the address on your licence, publish that. If not, write "no public address" against Street address, mark it as absent, and put the work into Service area and City or emirate instead, because that is where an answer will get your location from.

Somebody else controls your website. If the site is run by an agency you no longer work with, fill the checklist anyway: it becomes the brief you hand to whoever takes over. Fields 1 to 16 and 18 are page text and can be changed by anyone with the login. Field 17 is code. Before you commission anything, find out who holds the domain registration and the hosting login, which is a separate problem and a more urgent one than your opening hours.

You are the company. Named people means you: your name, your role, two lines of background. Where the licensed name is a person's name and the name over the door is something else, the sentence connecting the two matters more here than anywhere else on the list.

You trade under several names, or run several branches. Add a row per extra name under the field it belongs to. Insert it inside the block instead of adding it at the bottom, so the summary picks it up. On the Where it appears tab, copy the last three columns, Present, Differs and the verdict, down into the new row from the row above, because those are formulas. For branches, each one has its own address, its own hours and its own business profile, so copy the Where it appears tab once per branch. Google requires every location of the same business within one country to carry the same name, so what distinguishes a branch is its address, not a different brand.

The UAE company details checklist published with this article

The Company Information Checklist comes with this article as a free download, as 12-company-information-checklist.xlsx, and under the limits set out in Method, sources and notes below. It opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. If you work in Google Sheets and the dropdowns do not come through, open the file again through File, Import, and pick Replace spreadsheet. This is the working file, not a summary of one, and it has five tabs, in the order you meet them:

• Start here: what the file is, which cells are yours to type in, and the limits of the guidance.
• Company facts: the eighteen fields above, in the same order and under the same numbers. You fill the four yellow columns, and only the first two of them matter on the first pass.
• Where it appears: the NAP check in full, every field against five sources, marked present, missing or different. A verdict column reads "Consistent everywhere", "Missing from 3 of 5", "Sources disagree" or "Not published anywhere".
• Gap summary: counts and shares, every one of them a formula. How many facts are written down, how many are on the site as text, how many are consistent everywhere, how many contradict.
• Sources: each rule in the file with the documentation it comes from, linked where the documentation is public.

Lunasol's company information checklist Lunasol built this checklist for AI Visibility and released it with this article. It is free to use and free to pass on.

Here is the first five minutes. Open the Company facts tab. Rows 6 to 23 are your eighteen fields; row 5 is a grey italic example, so leave it alone. Work down the Your value column, writing each fact the way you want it quoted and not the way it happens to appear now. Then start again at the top of the next column, which has a dropdown offering Yes, No or Partly, and answer it by opening your own site and looking rather than from memory. Every yellow cell is yours to type in and nothing else is. Eighteen rows, two columns for now, and the Gap summary fills itself as you go. The Where it appears tab is the second sitting, not the first.

The useful moment is usually the Gap summary tab, on the row that reads "Facts where sources disagree", when that number turns out not to be zero.

If you would rather have somebody run it with you, Lunasol offers a free AI visibility check as a starting point. Lunasol's published process and its contact routes, WhatsApp and email, are at Lunasol.

Common questions

What details should a UAE business website include? We suggest eighteen facts, each one as text on the page. Who you are: your legal name, your trading name, and what you do in one sentence. What you sell: your service list, who you serve, and your price or pricing model. Where and when: your city or emirate, your service area, your street address, your phone, your email and your opening hours. Proof, people and language: your licence or registration, your founding year, your named people, your languages, the tools and platforms you work with, and structured data that matches the page. That is our recommendation, not a legal requirement.

What business information does AI search use about a company? In our own runs across ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode in September 2026, the answers carried price, regulator status or a licence number, years in business, and the software a firm supports. They also carried who it says it serves, third-party review records, fee structure, and the address down to the building. Every one of those was published by somebody before an answer repeated it.

What does ChatGPT say about my company? When it describes you at all, it draws on what your published sources say: your own pages, your business profile and the directories that list you. Nothing obliges it to mention you. You control which version of the facts is available if it does.

Does it matter for AI search if my name, address and phone differ between sources? Yes. A detail that differs between your website, your business profile and your directory listings puts two versions of you into circulation. Google asks for one, saying your name "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers" (Google Business Profile Help).

Method, sources and notes

This article and the checklist published with it are general guidance on how to describe a business on its own website, current at September 2026, and they are not legal, tax, data-protection or licensing advice. Nothing here describes what any UAE authority requires or permits you to publish, and nothing here should be read as a statement about what any trade licence, free zone licence or regulator registration allows. Check your own licence conditions and your regulator's rules before changing what you state about your licence, your registration or your service area. Where we suggest publishing the name, role or contact details of an individual, publish them only with that person's agreement: their personal data remains your responsibility under UAE data protection law and under any free zone regime that applies to you.

The survey described above covered twenty websites in one sector, in one day, over one connection, reading at most three pages per site and using pattern matching rather than reading, so a field counted missing means our patterns did not find it on the pages we fetched; on one site our fetch reached only the homepage. It illustrates where gaps sit rather than proving a rule, and nothing in it is a finding about any particular company. Assistant answers vary by account, location and time, and the answers behind it came from one account on one day; they are from our own logged runs and are available on request. Stating your facts clearly does not cause a mention, a citation or a ranking in any AI product, and nobody can promise one.

Product names are used here for identification only, and neither this publication nor its owner is affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of the companies named. ChatGPT is a product of OpenAI. Google Search, Google Search Central, Google Business Profile, Rich Results Test, AI Mode and AI Overviews are products or publications of Google. Excel is a product of Microsoft, Numbers of Apple, and Google Sheets of Google. WhatsApp is a product of Meta. All are trademarks of their respective owners. The Federal Tax Authority is named for identification only, and nothing here is approved or endorsed by it.

AI Visibility is owned by Lunasol.