Arabic keyword research for GCC markets

By Waggle · 19 October 2026

Fenlight's keyword ideas endpoint turns one seed keyword into the ideas Google itself offers for it: autocomplete suggestions, People Also Ask questions and related searches, each tagged with where it came from and what the searcher seems to want. It works with Arabic seeds, and it can target a Gulf city by its Arabic name. It gives no search volumes, and this guide says how to work around that.

What you get, and what you do not

• Ideas from three places: Google autocomplete (for the seed and for question words placed before it), People Also Ask and related searches, the last two from one Google results page.
• For each idea, the sources that gave it and one intent: question, comparison, commercial, local or informational. The labels come from plain word rules, in English and Arabic.
• Ideas that more sources agree on come first.
• No search volumes. There is no volume, difficulty or cost-per-click in the response: Fenlight has no volume data.

Step 1: start from an Arabic seed

With an Arabic seed the interface language defaults to Arabic (hl: ar) and the question words are Arabic: ما، كيف، لماذا، متى، أين، هل، كم، أي. The default expand is questions; with alphabet the 28 Arabic letters are appended to the seed instead, and all does both, up to 30 autocomplete calls in all.

Ideas are cleaned so that duplicates merge: case, spacing, Arabic diacritics and tatweel, and the alef and ya variants are folded together. The ta marbuta is not: قهوة and قهوه stay separate ideas, because people search for both.

Step 2: target the city

Send the city in location. Fenlight knows 115 cities by name, 24 of them in Arabic as well, and accepts any of 139,425 Google locations by canonical name or location_code. These Gulf cities resolve from their Arabic names:

• Write Abu Dhabi with the space, أبو ظبي: the joined spelling is not recognised.
• عمان means Amman in Jordan here. For Oman, use مسقط or send gl: om.
• For a place that is not in the list, send its English canonical name or its Google location_code.

Step 3: ask for ideas

curl -X POST https://fenlight.waggle.ae/v1/keywords/ideas \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FENLIGHT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "seed": "قهوة مختصة",
  "location": "دبي",
  "gl": "ae",
  "hl": "ar",
  "limit": 30,
  "expand": "questions"
}'

An abridged response, with the real field names:

{
  "status": "success",
  "seed": "قهوة مختصة",
  "gl": "ae",
  "hl": "ar",
  "location": {
    "canonical_name": "Dubai,Dubai,United Arab Emirates",
    "gl": "ae",
    "hl": "ar",
    "location_code": 1000013
  },
  "count": 30,
  "ideas": [
    {
      "keyword": "ما هي القهوة المختصة",
      "sources": [
        "autocomplete",
        "people_also_ask"
      ],
      "intent": "question"
    },
    {
      "keyword": "افضل قهوة مختصة في دبي",
      "sources": [
        "autocomplete",
        "related_searches"
      ],
      "intent": "local"
    },
    {
      "keyword": "سعر قهوة مختصة",
      "sources": [
        "autocomplete"
      ],
      "intent": "commercial"
    },
    {
      "keyword": "قهوة مختصة مقابل قهوة تجارية",
      "sources": [
        "related_searches"
      ],
      "intent": "comparison"
    },
    {
      "keyword": "قهوة مختصة دبي",
      "sources": [
        "autocomplete",
        "related_searches"
      ],
      "intent": "local"
    }
  ],
  "notes": [],
  "provenance": {
    "credits_used": 70,
    "search_calls": 1,
    "autocomplete_calls": 9,
    "autocomplete_queries": [
      "قهوة مختصة",
      "ما قهوة مختصة",
      "كيف قهوة مختصة"
    ],
    "expansion": "questions",
    "stopped_early": false,
    "budget_exceeded": false
  }
}

provenance.autocomplete_queries lists what was asked of autocomplete, and notes says if a call failed or the credits ran out. Calls stop as soon as limit ideas are in hand.

Cost. The default plan is one results page (7 credits live) plus up to 9 autocomplete calls at 7 credits each, so at most 70 credits, or about $0.020 to $0.038. An autocomplete call that returns nothing is not charged, and a repeat of the same search by your key within a day uses the cached page (1 credit instead of 7). expand: alphabet plans up to 29 calls (210 credits) and all up to 30 (217 credits).

Step 4: look at the results page in that city

Keyword ideas tell you what to look at; the results page tells you who you are up against. To see Google in Riyadh for an Arabic query:

curl -X POST https://fenlight.waggle.ae/v1/serp/google \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FENLIGHT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "q": "قهوة مختصة الرياض",
  "location": "الرياض",
  "gl": "sa",
  "hl": "ar",
  "depth": 10
}'

The response carries organic results, serp_features such as People Also Ask, and a location that shows what your Arabic name resolved to. A live page is 7 credits. Mobile and desktop results can differ on Google, but Fenlight's device setting does not change the results, so you cannot use it to compare them.

{
  "engine": "google",
  "query": "قهوة مختصة الرياض",
  "location": {
    "canonical_name": "Riyadh,Riyadh Province,Saudi Arabia",
    "gl": "sa",
    "hl": "ar",
    "location_code": 1012088
  },
  "provenance": {
    "credits_used": 7,
    "cache_hit": false
  },
  "organic": [
    {
      "position": 1,
      "title": "…",
      "link": "https://example.com/…",
      "snippet": "…",
      "domain": "example.com"
    }
  ],
  "serp_features": {
    "people_also_ask": [
      {
        "question": "…",
        "source_url": "https://example.com/…"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Choosing keywords without volumes

• Start with the ideas that appear in more than one sources list: they are the ones Google offers in several places.
• Group by intent. commercial and local ideas are the ones closest to a purchase; question ideas suit guides and FAQs.
• Check the results page for each short list in the target city: if it is full of large publishers or marketplaces, a small site will find it hard.
• Pair the list with a source of volumes (an ads account or a keyword-data API) before you commit budget to a keyword.

Limits to keep in mind

• There are no volumes, so the list is not ranked by demand. It is what Google suggests, not everything people search.
• Fenlight does not translate your seed or add dialect variants: apart from the question words and letters it adds, it asks Google's autocomplete for what you send.
• Only the cities above (and other places in Google's list) resolve by name; send a location_code when a name is not recognised.
• At most 200 ideas per request, and Google gives about ten per call. Limits: 60 requests a minute and at most 5 at once, per key.

The same endpoint is the keyword_ideas tool of the MCP server at https://fenlight.waggle.ae/mcp.