We just launched Rankfender in Arabic. What language should we launch next?

Rankfender now tracks AI visibility in Arabic.

Arabic is the sixth most spoken language in the world. Around 400 million speakers across more than 20 countries. One of the fastest-growing digital markets on the planet.

It is also the language our platform handled worst.

Why Arabic is not just another language in the list

When we added French or German, it was a translation job. Same word order, same search intent patterns, same content structure. Arabic is different in three ways that broke our assumptions.

Right to left changes everything. Our content generator had to be rebuilt for RTL. Not just flipped text. Headings, tables, lists, punctuation, numbers, mixed Arabic and Latin words in the same sentence. A comparison table that looks clean in English becomes unreadable when the direction is wrong.

Dialects are not the same as the written language. A user in Egypt, a user in Saudi Arabia, and a user in Morocco do not phrase the same question the same way. Modern Standard Arabic is what AI engines mostly return, but what people actually type is often a mix. If you only track MSA, you miss most of the real queries.

The AI engines behave differently in Arabic. We tested the same prompts in Arabic and in English for the same brands. The citation patterns were not the same. Sources that get cited in English do not always get cited in Arabic. And in many categories, the Arabic answers pull from a much smaller set of sources, which means the competition for citations is both easier and more concentrated.

What works now

RAIVE tracks Arabic citations across all seven AI systems.

RCGE generates Arabic content structured for AI extraction, with correct RTL formatting.

The proofreader flags machine-translated phrasing, which is the most common failure mode in Arabic content.

We do not translate from English. We generate in Arabic, then review.

What we learned doing this

Localization is not a language pack. It is understanding how discovery works in that market.

The brands winning in Arabic AI answers are not the biggest global brands. They are the ones who actually publish in Arabic, with real structure, not auto-translated pages.

The same is true in every market. Arabic just made it obvious.

What I am curious about:

What will be the next language we need to focus on for your projects?

Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO, Rankfender
rankfender.com