Arabic vs English Search Queries
No reliable public split of Arabic versus English search queries exists for Saudi Arabia. Here is what the real data shows, and how to find your own split.
There is no reliable public figure for what share of Saudi search queries are typed in Arabic versus English. What is measurable is the supply side — Arabic makes up about 0.6% of the web's content against roughly 49.5% for English — and your own Search Console data, which is a better guide than any national estimate.
That gap between supply and demand is one thread in the state of search in Saudi Arabia, which covers the market as a whole. This post stays on language: what can and cannot be measured, how the split tends to behave by category, and how to build a site that is findable in both.
On this page
Is there a reliable number for the Arabic-English query split?
No, and it is worth saying plainly rather than repeating a guess as fact. Search engines do not publish a language breakdown of queries by country, and the panel-based tools that estimate other Saudi search statistics do not cover this either. Any blog post quoting an exact percentage split is estimating from something else — usually browser language settings, which measure device configuration, not what a person actually types.
That absence of data is itself useful information. It means the right move is not to find a better source, but to stop looking for a single national number and build your plan from what you can actually measure: your own site's queries, category by category.
Part of why a clean number does not exist is that "Arabic query" and "English query" are not always separate things. A single search can mix scripts — an English brand name typed alongside an Arabic word for "price" or "near me" — and neither a search engine's public reporting nor most third-party tools sort mixed-script queries into one bucket or the other. Any tool that claims to hand you a precise Saudi-wide percentage is making a choice about how to bucket that middle group, and it rarely says which choice it made.
There is also a difference between the language a person searches in and the language they read comfortably. A Saudi professional educated abroad might type a technical query in English out of habit, while still preferring an Arabic landing page once they arrive. Query language and content-preference language correlate, but they are not the same measurement, and conflating them is where a lot of bad advice about "picking one language" comes from.
What does the supply side of the web look like?
Thin, for Arabic, relative to how many people speak it. W3Techs tracks the language of website content across the whole web, and as of September 2026 English accounted for about 49.5% of sites whose content language is known, while Arabic accounted for about 0.6% — putting it around 19th among tracked languages, behind languages with far smaller populations of speakers [1].
49.5% English, 0.6% Arabic
This is a supply-side number, not a demand-side one, and the distinction matters. It does not say how often people search in Arabic; it says how much Arabic content exists to be found when they do. A thin supply, competing for real demand, is usually an opportunity: less competition per query, for a business willing to write real Arabic pages rather than translate its English ones.
The gap is not shrinking quickly, either. Arabic has sat in roughly the same low-single-digit position relative to English for years of W3Techs' tracking, even as internet access across the Arabic-speaking world has grown close to saturation [1][4]. That combination — a near-universal audience and a thin content supply in their own language — is unusual, and it is the main reason "just write it in Arabic too" remains underused advice rather than a solved problem most businesses have already acted on.
Which topics tend to skew Arabic, and which skew English?
Unevenly, by category, in a pattern that is consistent even without a national percentage to prove it. Everyday, local and service-related searches lean Arabic. Software, technical products, global brand names and some fashion and electronics terms lean English. Many queries mix the two inside a single search.
| Category | Typical lead language | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Government and public services | Arabic | Official terminology and forms are published in Arabic first |
| Local services and food delivery | Arabic | Everyday, conversational queries typed the way people actually speak |
| Consumer electronics and gadgets | English | Brand and model names are rarely translated |
| Enterprise software and B2B SaaS | English | Category terms and vendor names are usually English-native |
| Fashion and beauty | Mixed | Brand names in English, styling and occasion terms in Arabic |
| Real estate | Arabic, with English project names | Listings and legal terms are Arabic; developments often carry English brand names |
Retail categories are worth a closer look here, since Saudi ecommerce market size shows consumer electronics as the single largest product category by revenue — exactly the category where English brand and model names tend to dominate the query itself, even inside an otherwise Arabic-first shopping session.
Spelling adds another layer of noise on the Arabic side. The same word can appear in several written forms depending on dialect influence and how a person's keyboard is set up, so a single "correct" Arabic keyword often needs to be researched as a small family of variants rather than one term.
Take a plumber searching for customers, and a SaaS company selling to enterprises, as two ends of the same market. The plumber's buyers type in Modern Standard Arabic or dialect, describe the problem in plain words, and search from a phone in the moment something has broken. The SaaS company's buyers are more likely to search a product category name in English, compare vendors on desktop, and read a pricing page carefully before ever filling out a form. Both are Saudi searches; neither is well served by the same language strategy, and a single national percentage would tell either of them almost nothing useful.
What changes across devices and the season?
Two things worth separating from the language question, even though they interact with it. Mobile search in Saudi Arabia shows phones carrying the majority of Saudi traffic; anecdotally, quick, local Arabic queries are especially common on mobile, while longer research sessions — often, though not always, more English-leaning — skew more toward desktop. Neither pattern is precisely measured, but both are consistent enough across client accounts to plan around.
Season changes it too, more than most language guides mention. Ramadan search trends shows demand shifting toward recipes, gifting and family occasions during the holy month, and that seasonal content is disproportionately Arabic, because it is rooted in local custom and language in a way a year-round software category is not. A bilingual content calendar that treats every month the same misses this.
How should a bilingual site actually be structured?
On separate URLs, linked to each other, not guessed at runtime. Google's own guidance is to give each language its own page and connect the versions with hreflang annotations, rather than auto-redirecting a visitor based on browser language or IP location [2][3]. Auto-redirecting can trap a crawler on the wrong version and can send a returning visitor to a language they did not choose that visit.
Put each language on its own URL
A subfolder such as /ar/ is enough; the exact pattern matters less than doing it consistently.
Link every pair with hreflang
Each language version should point to every other version, including itself, so search engines can connect them as one set.
Let the visitor choose, and remember it
Offer a clear language switcher rather than forcing a redirect based on a guess about where someone is.
Keep both versions' content in sync in meaning, not in wording
The two pages should answer the same question completely, not read as a literal word-for-word mirror of each other.
Does translating the English page solve it?
Not on its own. A translated page answers the English query's structure using Arabic words; it inherits an outline, a set of headings and an emphasis built for how an English speaker searches, not how an Arabic speaker does. The difference is often invisible to someone skimming the page and very visible in how it ranks.
A native brief costs more per page than a translation, because someone has to research how the query is actually phrased in Arabic rather than start from an English draft. It is usually worth it: the gap between a translated page and a native one tends to show up in rankings within a few months, once Google has had time to compare how each performs against real Arabic queries.
There is a middle option worth naming, because it is where most sites actually sit rather than at either extreme. A page can start as a machine translation, get restructured around how the Arabic query is actually phrased, and then get a native editing pass for tone and idiom, without a bilingual writer starting from a blank page every time. That is slower than pure machine translation and faster than a from-scratch native brief, and for a large catalogue — a Salla or Zid store with thousands of product pages, for instance — it is often the only version of "native Arabic content" that is actually affordable at scale.
How do you find your own split, this week?
Open Google Search Console's Performance report and filter by query. You will not get a clean percentage — mixed-language and transliterated queries will not sort neatly — but you will see, in your own buyers' words, which pages already draw Arabic queries and which draw English ones, and which pages draw neither well.
Do the same inside the Google Ads Keyword Planner for any category you are considering, checking volume and competition separately for the Arabic and English versions of the same term. The two numbers are frequently not proportional to each other, and that gap is where a real content decision gets made, not in a national percentage nobody can actually verify.
With around 34.4 million people online in Saudi Arabia [4], both languages represent a market large enough to be worth building properly, rather than treating one as primary and the other as an afterthought translation. If you would rather have that native research and writing done for you, that is what our Arabic SEO service covers.
Questions people also ask
Is there a real percentage split between Arabic and English search in Saudi Arabia?
Not a reliable public one. No search engine or analytics provider publishes a national query-language breakdown for Saudi Arabia. Anyone quoting an exact number is estimating, not reporting a measured figure.
Why is Arabic content so rare on the web if it is a language millions search in?
Arabic makes up about 0.6% of website content globally, against roughly 49.5% for English, which is a supply-side gap, not a demand one. Fewer Arabic pages exist to compete for a query than the number of Arabic speakers would suggest.
Should I run separate Arabic and English URLs, or one page with a switcher?
Separate URLs, linked with hreflang. Google's own guidance recommends this over a single auto-detecting page, because it lets both language versions be indexed, ranked and shared on their own.
Is a machine translation of my English page good enough for the Arabic version?
As a first draft only. Unedited machine output reads as translated, and it answers the English query's structure in Arabic words rather than the way an Arabic speaker actually phrases the question.
Where do I find my own Arabic versus English split?
Google Search Console's Performance report, filtered by query, is the closest thing to a real answer, because it shows your actual buyers rather than a national estimate that may not describe them.
Sources
- Historical yearly trends in the distribution of content languages — W3Techs (checked 23 September 2026)
- Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites — Google Search Central (checked 23 September 2026)
- Tell Google about localized versions of your page — Google Search Central (checked 23 September 2026)
- Digital 2026: Saudi Arabia — DataReportal (Kepios) (checked 23 September 2026)
Find out where your own Arabic and English pages are missing demand
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Who wrote this
Jeremy ZavaCo-founder
Leads growth and client partnerships.
Works on: CRO, SEO
Reviewed before publishing by Ibrahem Helal, Co-founder.
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