Does your Dubai business website really have an Arabic version? A 10-minute self-check

Arabic is the official language of the UAE, and English is used widely in business. So a company in Dubai that publishes its website in English only, or in English with a language button in the corner, rarely sees that as a problem. The button says Arabic, the page changes, box checked.

But "we have an Arabic version" is not a yes-or-no question. A version can exist for a visitor and not exist for Google, for ChatGPT or for the screen reader of someone who needs one. This guide gives you a ten-minute check you can run on your own site with nothing but a browser, and explains what to do with each result.

Where this comes from: we're a studio based in Buenos Aires, with no office and no clients in the Gulf. In early October 2026 we measured the homepage of 110 companies in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, hand-picked, leaving out multinationals and sites an agency had just rebuilt. The sample is not random, we read only the homepage and the HTML each site delivers (the same thing a crawler reads, without JavaScript), and we can't say anything about "Dubai companies" as a whole. Inside that sample, 39 companies are based in Dubai, and 37 of them could be measured.

Key takeaways

• +Of the 37 measurable Dubai-based companies in our sample, all 37 had an English homepage and 33 (89%) had no real Arabic version: no link, no hreflang, no page at /ar/, only a PDF, or a link that led to a page not in Arabic. Across the whole sample, it was 71 of 82 English homepages (87%).
• +A language button doesn't prove an Arabic version exists. Check that the Arabic text lives on its own URL and is in the HTML the server sends, not added in the visitor's browser by a translation widget.
• +Google recommends a separate URL for each language version, with hreflang annotations that point to each other. It doesn't use the lang attribute to detect a page's language: it reads the visible content.
• +lang="ar" and dir="rtl" on the html element still matter, for screen readers, browser tools and correct text rendering. They just aren't a ranking trick.
• +The check takes about ten minutes and needs no tools. Fixing what it finds is a project: a real right-to-left layout, native Arabic copy and the language annotations.

What we found in the sample (and what it doesn't prove)

Here are the numbers we're willing to stand behind, with their limits. In the 37 measurable Dubai-based companies, every homepage was in English. 33 of them had no real Arabic version. Six loaded an automatic translation widget in JavaScript. Of the four that did have a real Arabic version, none declared dir="rtl" or lang="ar" on the html element, and only one declared hreflang between the Arabic and English versions.

Two caveats. First, four is a very small number, so read it as an anecdote and not as a rate. Second, a missing dir attribute doesn't mean the page looks wrong: a site can be styled right-to-left with CSS and still leave the html element undeclared. It does mean the browser, a screen reader and a translation tool don't get the signal. In the wider sample of 11 sites with a real Arabic version, 3 reused the homepage title word for word.

How we measured it: for each company we fetched the homepage as the server delivers it, looked for a link to the other language, a hreflang or a page at /ar/, and counted a version as real only if the page we found was mostly Arabic text. What follows is that same check, turned into something you can do yourself.

The 10-minute self-check

Run these in order. Each step tells you what a pass looks like and what a failure means.

1. Does Arabic have its own URL?

Open your homepage and switch to Arabic with your site's own button. Look at the address bar. If it changes to something like /ar/ or an Arabic subdomain, you have a separate page, which is what you want. If the address stays the same and only the text changes, the translation is happening in the browser, and that's the setup Google advises against: it recommends different URLs for each language version rather than using cookies or browser settings to adjust the language, and warns that if you change content dynamically, it might not find and crawl all your variations.

2. Does the HTML itself contain Arabic?

On the Arabic page, right-click and choose View page source (not Inspect, which shows the page after scripts have run). Press Ctrl+F or Cmd+F and search for any Arabic word you can see on screen. If the source contains it, the server is sending Arabic. If the source is all English while the screen shows Arabic, something translated the page after it loaded.

One caveat: if your site is built as a client-side app, the source can be nearly empty in any language. In that case, ask your developer whether the pages are rendered on the server, because that decides what every crawler other than Google's gets to read.

3. Do the two versions point at each other (hreflang)?

In the page source of the English homepage, search for hreflang. You should find one line for English, one for Arabic and ideally an x-default. The Arabic page needs the same set. Google requires the annotations to be reciprocal: if page A points to page B and B doesn't point back, the tags may be ignored. The Arabic code can be ar or ar-AE: the region is optional, and a language-only ar is valid for every Arabic speaker.

4. Do lang and dir say what the page is?

Still in the source of the Arabic page, look at the opening html tag. It should read lang="ar" and dir="rtl". The W3C's guidance is to put dir="rtl" on the html element when the whole document is right-to-left, so blocks and table columns start on the right.

Be precise about what this does. Google says it uses the visible content of a page to determine its language and doesn't use code-level information such as lang attributes. So don't expect rankings to move because of these two attributes. They matter for the people and tools that do read them: screen readers choose the right voice, browsers pick fonts and quote marks, and numbers and English brand names inside an Arabic sentence stay in the right order.

5. Is the Arabic title really Arabic?

Look at the browser tab on the Arabic page. The title should be in Arabic and describe that page, not repeat the English title. The same goes for the meta description. In our wider sample, 3 of the 11 sites with a real Arabic version showed the same title in both languages, which means that in search results the Arabic page can't say anything to an Arabic-speaking searcher.

6. Is the layout actually mirrored?

Look at the screen with your own eyes. Navigation and the logo should flip, text should align to the right, arrows and back buttons should point the other way, and forms should read right to left. Then test the awkward spots: a phone number, an English brand name or a price inside an Arabic sentence. A layout that looks mirrored on the homepage but breaks in the contact form is a common failure.

7. Go beyond the homepage

Our measurement only read the homepage, and yours shouldn't stop there. Open the page where someone decides to contact you, whether that's services, a product page or the contact form, and repeat steps 1 and 2. A site with an Arabic homepage and English everywhere behind it is half a version.

8. Ask an AI assistant, in both languages

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity a question your customer would ask, such as who to hire for your service in Dubai, once in English and once in Arabic. Note whether your company appears in either answer. Results vary from one run to the next, so treat it as a rough signal and not a score. Our free Arabic website checker automates the technical part of this list (a real Arabic version, language and direction, hreflang, titles) and asks an AI assistant, in English, whether it recommends your brand.

Why a translation widget doesn't count

Translation widgets are popular because they take an afternoon to install. They work by translating the page inside the visitor's browser after it loads, so the HTML your server delivers stays in one language. A person sees Arabic; a crawler that reads the HTML sees English, with no Arabic URL to index. Six of the 37 Dubai-based sites in our sample loaded one.

That's not to say a widget is useless. For a visitor who wants a quick gist, it helps. But it is not an Arabic version, and it doesn't make your business findable in Arabic. It also gives you no control over the translation, which matters for names, legal terms and anything a customer could act on.

What fixing it involves

If the check shows gaps, here is the shape of the work. None of it is exotic, but all of it has to be done together.

• +A separate URL structure for Arabic, such as /ar/, with every page that matters available in both languages.
• +A right-to-left layout built for it: components mirrored, an Arabic typeface with line heights that don't clip the script, and forms tested with mixed Arabic and English input.
• +Arabic copy written or reviewed by a native speaker you approve. We build and test the layout; we don't ask you to trust a machine translation for the words that sell.
• +hreflang between the two versions, lang and dir on the html element, a distinct title and description per page, and both versions in the sitemap.
• +Both languages in the structured data and in the text that states who you are and where you operate, because that is what AI assistants quote.

On cost: our published prices start at USD 800 for a landing page, USD 1,500 for a business website, USD 1,200 for a WordPress site and USD 3,000 for an online store. A second language adds scope, so a bilingual build is quoted as part of the project and we don't publish a separate number for it. If you already have an English site, tell us, because adding Arabic to an existing build is a different scope from building both at once.

When an Arabic version can wait

Not every business needs one today. If your customers are international companies and expats who search and write to you in English, and your inquiries arrive in English, an English-only site can be a reasonable decision. The test is simple: look at the language of your last twenty inquiries, and at the countries and queries in Search Console if you have it. What you shouldn't do is claim an Arabic version you don't have. A button that does nothing is worse than no button.

Being the outsider here has a cost, and we'd rather say it. We can't be in your office, and a decision about the Arabic words on your site has to include a native speaker on your side. If you want to know how a team outside the Gulf works with a business in Dubai, we wrote the longer version.