Fundamentals
How search engines work, and which ones actually matter in the Gulf
Ilyes Massoudi7 min readThe short answer
A search engine works in three steps: crawling, where automated software visits your pages and reads them; indexing, where it decides which pages to store and what they are about; and ranking, where it picks the best answers to a user's query from what it stored, using hundreds of signals, chiefly relevance, quality, trust and location. In the Gulf, Google holds well over nine tenths of web search, so it is what you optimise for first. YouTube is the second search engine for practical questions, Bing matters through Copilot, and answer engines such as ChatGPT take a growing share of purchase questions. Nothing else deserves a business owner's time.
Why the mechanism matters
Every piece of SEO advice you read maps back to one of three steps a search engine performs. Anyone who understands the three steps can judge any advice alone: does it help the engine reach my page, understand it, or prefer it? If it does none of the three, it is noise.
Step one: crawling
Automated software, which Google calls Googlebot, visits web pages the way a browser does: it requests the page, reads the HTML the server sends, and follows the links in it to other pages. It has a budget: it does not crawl everything every day, but according to the site’s importance and response speed.
What crawling decides about your site: whether the engine can reach your pages at all. A robots.txt file can block it, a slow server slows it, a page nothing links to may never be found, and text drawn by JavaScript after load may never be seen.
Step two: indexing
After reading, the engine decides whether the page deserves storage in its index, and what it is about. Not every crawled page is indexed: thin, duplicated, machine-translated pages, and those carrying a noindex tag, are silently excluded here. In this step the engine also determines the page’s language, its canonical version if it has several, and its entity: a local business, a product, or an article.
What it decides about your site: whether your pages exist in the index at all. The Pages report in Search Console shows the decision page by page, and the reasons are detailed in the site-not-showing article.
Step three: ranking
When someone searches, the engine selects from the index the pages that answer, and orders them by hundreds of signals. Google does not publish the signals with their weights, but it describes their families:
- Relevance: whether the page answers the meaning of the query, not just its words. The engine understands that “AC repair” and “AC maintenance” are one intent.
- Quality: whether the content is original, useful and written with expertise, or generic and repeated.
- Trust: whether other sites reference the page, and whether the entity behind it is known.
- Context: the searcher’s location, language, device and history. A searcher in Doha sees different results from a searcher in Cairo for the same query.
- Experience: the page’s speed on mobile, its security and usability, as tiebreakers.
What it decides about your site: where you appear among the pages that answer. This is the only step most people think about, and the one over which you have the least direct control.
Order matters: step one before step three
A page that cannot be crawled will never be indexed, and a page that is not indexed can never rank however good it is. Most Gulf sites whose performance disappoints their owners have a problem in step one or two while spending all their effort on step three: new content for a site half of which is not indexed.
Which search engines matter in the Gulf
| Engine | Share and effect in the Gulf | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Well over nine tenths of web search in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar | Everything on this site | |
| YouTube | The second search engine for practical questions, especially on mobile | A video per purchase question; details in YouTube SEO |
| Bing | A small share, but the source behind Copilot, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo | Nothing extra; what works on Google works there, plus verification in Bing Webmaster Tools |
| ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity | A growing share of purchase questions, fastest in English | Direct quotable answers and crawler access; details in the GEO article |
| TikTok and Instagram | Social search for restaurants, fashion and beauty among younger users | A social presence if your sector is visual, not SEO |
| Yandex, Baidu, Naver | No share in the Gulf | Ignore |
| App stores and Maps | Google Maps is a search engine in its own right for local businesses | A complete Business Profile |
The rule: optimise for Google, add YouTube if your sector asks questions, and answer engines come with nearly the same work. Nothing else deserves a business owner’s time.
Common questions about engines that do not concern your business
Demand for “unrestricted search engine”, “best search engine other than Google” and “Russian search engine” is large in Arabic data, and all of it comes from users looking for alternatives for their own reasons, not from customers looking for a business. No alternative engine with a meaningful Gulf share deserves optimisation. If you are looking for one for personal reasons, that is a different article from this one.
What this looks like in the audit
The Digital Presence Audit walks the three steps in the same order: what the engine can reach, what it indexes, and where you rank against your competitors, then adds YouTube and answer engines as measured channels. The plan always starts from the first step where the problem is, not from the third where the wish is.