AI Search in Kuwait: Which Brands Are Winning Across Telecom, Food Delivery, and Payments?
Written by Ahmad Alobaid Updated 23 March 2026 4—minute read
We analyzed the AI visibility of leading Kuwaiti brands on ChatGPT and Gemini across three sectors: Food Delivery, Telecommunications, and Online Payments. The study highlights the top-performing brands in each category and compares their performance against competitors. Using BuzzSense, companies can better understand and optimize their presence in AI assistants, improving their visibility in the growing landscape of AI search (GEO).
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Introduction
More than ever, people are turning to AI assistants to search for products and ask for recommendations, whether it’s food delivery apps, telecom providers, or AI consultancy companies like Runzbuzz.
- But do brands actually know how they perform in systems like ChatGPT or Gemini?
- How often do they appear?
- And which competitors are being recommended more frequently?
Answering these questions is not straightforward. It requires continuously tracking brand mentions, visibility, and performance over time across multiple AI systems and languages.
This is where tools like BuzzSense.ai come in. Instead of building complex tracking systems from scratch, companies can focus on understanding their performance, benchmarking against competitors, and optimizing their visibility through SEO and GEO strategies tailored for AI assistants.
In this study, we focus on aggregated results across multiple AI models. While BuzzSense provides deeper insights and breakdowns across several dimensions, this report highlights the key trends at a high level.
We analyzed top Kuwaiti brands using buzzsense.ai across three sectors:
- Food Delivery
- Telecommunications
- Online Payment Solutions
The results are aggregated from hundreds of prompts executed across six different AI models, in both Arabic and English.
What Is Brand Visibility in AI Search?
When people use AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini, they often ask for recommendations, whether it’s for products, services, or companies.
For example, a user might ask:
“I want to build an app that recommends events to users in Kuwait. Can you suggest local companies specialized in AI?”
The AI will typically respond by listing several companies, along with explanations. For instance, it might mention:
- Runzbuzz
- Company B
- Company C
Each with different strengths and weaknesses.
So where does “visibility” come in?
Now imagine this question is asked multiple times, across:
- different AI models
- different languages
- and over time
Each time, the AI may return slightly different answers:
- Sometimes Runzbuzz is mentioned *
- Sometimes Company B is missing *
- Sometimes a new competitor appears *
Measuring Visibility
To quantify this, we track how often each brand appears in AI-generated responses (along with other signals which we omit here for simplicity).
For example:
- Runzbuzz → 2 mentions out of 2 responses
- Company B → 1 out of 2
- Company C → 2 out of 2
Over a larger sample, this becomes more meaningful:
- Runzbuzz → 95 / 100
- Company B → 60 / 100
- Company C → 77 / 100
- Company D → 13 / 100
What This Means
This score represents AI visibility:
How frequently a brand is mentioned when users ask relevant questions.
The higher the number, the more likely the brand is to be recommended by AI assistants.
Why It Matters
AI assistants are becoming a new discovery channel, similar to search engines, but more opinionated. If your brand:
- appears frequently → you get recommended
- appears rarely → your competitors win the opportunity
A Note on the Results
In practice, visibility can be broken down across multiple dimensions: Language, AI model, intent. For simplicity, we focus in this report on aggregated visibility scores.
Now that we understand how visibility is measured, let’s look at how Kuwaiti brands perform across different sectors.
AI Visibility in Telecom: Zain Leads in English, Ooredoo in Arabic
The telecommunications sector in Kuwait is relatively concentrated, with three main operators and a virtual one (Virgin Mobile). Interestingly, rankings vary depending on language:
- In English prompts, Zain ranks highest, followed by Ooredoo.
- In Arabic prompts, Ooredoo takes the lead, with Zain in second place.
- STC and Virgin Mobile consistently rank third and fourth, respectively, across both languages.
This highlights a key insight: language plays a significant role in brand visibility within AI systems.
Food Delivery in AI Search: Consistent Rankings Across Languages
The food delivery space in Kuwait is more competitive, with several active players. Across both Arabic and English prompts, the ranking remains consistent:
However, language performance tells a more nuanced story:
Talabat is the only brand where Arabic visibility outperforms English. Deliveroo and Jahez perform significantly better in English. Keeta, being a newer entrant, shows low visibility across both languages.
This suggests that brand maturity and localization strategy both impact AI visibility.
Payment Providers: Diverging Results Between Arabic and English
For this category, we focused on e-Payment Service Providers (EPSPs) approved by the Central Bank of Kuwait, as listed on their official website. We filtered and analyzed the top-performing providers and observed notable differences between Arabic and English prompts.
English prompts:
Arabic prompts:
To better understand overall performance, we computed the average visibility across both languages: Upayments ranks highest overall, followed by Tap Payments, and then Myfatoorah. This reinforces the importance of balanced multilingual visibility.
Conclusion: The Importance of Multilingual Optimization
Our analysis shows that optimizing for one language does not guarantee visibility in another. This is especially critical in markets like Kuwait, where audiences are split between Arabic and English, with many users consuming content in both. As AI assistants become a primary discovery channel, brands need to actively monitor and optimize their presence in these systems.
If you don’t want to be left behind in the AI era, make sure to track your brand performance in AI assistants using tools like buzzsense.ai.
