Top 10 Most Visited Websites in the UAE in 2025

Where do people in the UAE actually spend their time online? Which platforms held them through 2025, which ones lost ground, and what does that tell UAE businesses about where attention lives? This retrospective answers those questions using two independent measurement systems, with every figure traceable to a public source.

Methodology: How We Counted

“Most visited” is not a single number. Different measurement systems use different methods and produce different rankings. To give an honest picture, we cross-reference two of the most authoritative public sources.

📋 Similarweb (primary source for ranking)

Similarweb estimates web traffic using a combination of panel data, ISP partnerships, public data, and direct measurement from sites that opt in. Their UAE top websites ranking updates monthly and is widely cited by industry. We use this for the ordered top 10.

📋 Cloudflare Radar (cross-check via DNS)

Cloudflare Radar measures domain popularity via anonymised queries to its 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. The methodology is fundamentally different from Similarweb (DNS lookups, not user sessions) and so often produces a slightly different ranking, especially for services with heavy API or background traffic. We use Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review and the UAE-specific Radar dashboard as a cross-check on shifts and trends.

Where the two systems agree, we treat the picture as solid. Where they differ, we say so explicitly.

The Top 10 Most Visited Websites in the UAE

Per Similarweb’s UAE rankings:

For context on what sits just outside the top 10: gulfnews.com (#11, the other major English UAE daily), reddit.com (#12, climbing as a discovery channel), tiktok.com (#13, despite a turbulent year globally), and gemini.google.com (#14, Google’s AI rising fast).

Cross-Check: What Cloudflare Radar Saw in 2025

Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review of Internet services measures things slightly differently (services rather than just websites, DNS queries rather than user sessions), but the picture aligns with Similarweb on the big themes:

• Google held #1 globally for the fourth consecutive year. Facebook (Meta) held #2.
• ChatGPT remained #1 in Generative AI globally for the third consecutive year, but the field around it became genuinely competitive: Gemini held the #2 spot in the GenAI category by year-end, with Claude, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek all reaching the top 10.
• Instagram climbed from #7 in 2024 to #5 globally by year-end 2025, peaking at #4 mid-year. Cloudflare specifically noted: “Instagram ranked highest in parts of Central Asia and the Gulf region”, a pattern visible in the UAE data.
• YouTube rose one place to #7 globally in 2025.
• WhatsApp held #10 globally and remained #1 in messaging worldwide for the fourth consecutive year. In the UAE, WhatsApp’s importance is even higher than the global ranking suggests because it doubles as a primary business communication channel.
• X (formerly Twitter) declined globally, falling out of the top 20 by year-end 2025. The UAE bucks this trend slightly, X still ranks #4 in Similarweb’s UAE list, partly reflecting the platform’s traction with Arabic-language news and political discussion.
• TikTok fell from #4 in late 2024 to #8 globally by end of 2025, with a temporary U.S. ban early in the year.
• ChatGPT in the UAE specifically: Cloudflare noted ChatGPT reached the Top 30 in the UAE during 2025, a significant marker of mainstream AI adoption.

Beyond the Top 10: The Full UAE Web Landscape (Positions 11-50)

The top 10 is dominated by global platforms, which is true in nearly every country. The interesting UAE-specific story sits in positions 11 through 50, where local players, regional sites, multilingual news, government services, and the UAE’s role as a travel hub all become visible. Here is the full picture per Similarweb:

Reading this list as a UAE business operator, several patterns emerge that you cannot see from the top 10 alone.

📋 The UAE-local ecosystem: ten domestic sites in the top 50

Counting UAE-headquartered or UAE-targeting domains in the top 50: amazon.ae (#9), khaleejtimes.com (#8), gulfnews.com (#11), uaepass.ae (#20), noon.com (#25), emirates.com (#28), dubizzle.com (#32), bayut.com (#39), airarabia.com (#42), and fazaa.ae (#48). That is ten of fifty positions, twenty percent of the most-visited slots, occupied by UAE-anchored brands. Three of those use .ae domains (amazon.ae, uaepass.ae, fazaa.ae), and the rest run on .com but operate primarily for UAE customers.

This matters because it shows where local presence actually wins: government services (uaepass.ae), real estate (bayut), classifieds (dubizzle), aviation (emirates, airarabia), residents’ privileges (fazaa), and local journalism (Khaleej Times, Gulf News). These are categories where being from the UAE, regulated under UAE law, and serving UAE-specific use cases creates a moat that global platforms cannot easily breach.

📋 News consumption is multilingual, not just bilingual

Position 11 to 50 contains ten different news sites serving distinct language and cultural audiences: Khaleej Times (#8, English UAE), Gulf News (#11, English UAE), Al Jazeera (#19, Arabic and English regional), Yahoo (#21, global aggregator), BBC (#26, UK English), Mathrubhumi (#35, Malayalam for the Kerala diaspora), Manorama Online (#36, Malayalam), NDTV (#40, Indian English), CNN (#44, US English), and Hindustan Times (#47, Indian English).

The presence of two Malayalam-language Indian news sites in the top 50 is particularly telling. The UAE is home to a large Kerala-origin community (estimates put it at over one million residents), and that community reads news in Malayalam at home, not in English. Similar patterns hold for Tagalog, Urdu, Bengali, and Arabic dialects from different countries. For UAE businesses targeting expat workforces, English-only content is structurally under-serving the audience.

We covered the technical setup for serving multiple languages from a single WordPress site, including hreflang tags and right-to-left support for Arabic, in our guide on multilingual WordPress sites.

📋 Generative AI is a competitive field, not a single product

ChatGPT at #3 is the dramatic headline, but the deeper data point is that three different AI tools appear in the UAE top 50: ChatGPT (#3), Google Gemini (#14), and Anthropic’s Claude (#33). All three landed in the top 50 within months of each other, and Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review confirms the global pattern: Gemini holds #2 in the GenAI category by year-end, and Claude, Perplexity, Grok, and DeepSeek all sit in the global top 10.

For UAE businesses, the implication is that “show up in AI answers” is not a single-vendor problem. Optimising only for ChatGPT is the same mistake as optimising only for Google Search and ignoring Bing five years ago. Each system has slightly different ranking signals and citation behaviour.

📋 E-commerce: six different sites, six different battlegrounds

The top 50 contains six distinct e-commerce or commerce-adjacent sites, each occupying a different segment: amazon.ae (#9, general marketplace), noon.com (#25, regional marketplace), dubizzle.com (#32, peer-to-peer classifieds), bayut.com (#39, real estate), booking.com (#41, travel commerce), and temu.com (#45, cross-border discount marketplace). This is unusually diverse compared with most country rankings, where one or two players dominate.

The presence of Temu at #45, after only entering the UAE market relatively recently, is a notable trend. Per Similarweb’s UAE e-commerce category ranking, Temu has already overtaken Noon for the #2 spot within the e-commerce vertical (overall site ranking lags vertical ranking). This signals that cross-border platforms with aggressive logistics and pricing are pulling UAE consumers, especially in lower-ticket categories. For UAE-based e-tailers, see our 2025 e-commerce retrospective for the full market context.

📋 The UAE as a travel hub, reflected in the data

Five travel and aviation sites sit in the top 50: emirates.com (#28, the UAE flag carrier), flightradar24.com (#30, real-time flight tracking), booking.com (#41, hotels), airarabia.com (#42, regional low-cost), and fazaa.ae (#48, residents’ discount programme that includes major travel components). This concentration of travel-related sites in a top-50 list is unusual and reflects something specific about the UAE: it is both a transit hub for the world (Emirates serves over 150 destinations) and an outbound-travel-heavy market (UAE residents take more international trips per capita than most populations).

For UAE businesses in tourism, hospitality, or anything travel-adjacent, this is opportunity: your customers are already heavy users of travel content and booking platforms, and integrations with these channels (or content that ranks alongside them) deliver real distribution.

📋 Productivity and SaaS: the Microsoft stack runs UAE business

Looking at positions 15 to 50, an obvious pattern is the dominance of Microsoft properties in productivity: microsoft.com (#15), office.com (#18), cloud.microsoft (#22), and live.com (#24, Outlook and Hotmail). Add Zoom (#23), Canva (#31), and Zoho (#43), and you have a clear picture of the UAE knowledge worker’s daily toolkit. Apple’s apex domain (#37) is high partly because of iCloud and App Store traffic.

For B2B sites targeting UAE businesses, the practical implication is that integration with the Microsoft ecosystem (single sign-on, Teams integration, Office add-ins) is a meaningful conversion lever. UAE companies are running on Microsoft 365 at a rate that justifies prioritising those integrations over alternatives.

📋 What this picture says about UAE digital maturity

Putting the whole top 50 together, the UAE web in 2025 looks like a fully developed digital economy with three layers stacked on top of each other:

1. Global platforms layer (positions 1 to 7). Google, YouTube, ChatGPT, X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. Same as everywhere else in the world.
2. UAE-anchored services layer (positions 8 to 50, ten domestic sites). Local news, government, e-commerce, classifieds, aviation, real estate. This is where UAE businesses actually compete, and where a .ae domain plus UAE hosting plus content in the right languages produces compounding advantages.
3. Multicultural and SaaS layer (positions 11 to 50, the rest). Indian, US, UK, regional Arabic news; Microsoft and Apple productivity; Zoom; design tools; cricket; AI. These reflect the UAE’s expat workforce and its position as a regional services hub.

For a UAE business deciding where to invest digital marketing budget, that three-layer model is more useful than a single top-10 list. It tells you where you cannot compete (layer 1, do not try to outrank Google), where you can win with the right setup (layer 2, the UAE-anchored layer), and where to look for partnerships and integrations rather than competition (layer 3).

What the 2025 Data Actually Tells Us

📋 AI moved from “interesting” to “essential”

The most striking shift in the UAE rankings is ChatGPT at #3. To put that in perspective: ChatGPT did not exist as a public product before November 2022. By late 2025, it sat above Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and every news site in the UAE.

For UAE businesses, the implication is concrete: AI is no longer a future trend to plan around, it is a present-day channel where customers form opinions and find recommendations. Sites that show up clearly in AI-generated answers will win, and those that do not will lose share to those that do.

📋 The .ae versus .com question, with data

The original 2025 article noted “Amazon.ae is the only .ae site in the top 10” as a positive signal. The fuller picture is more nuanced. .ae domains are less prevalent in the absolute top 10 than .com because the top 10 is dominated by global platforms (Google, Meta, OpenAI, X, LinkedIn) which use .com by convention. But within the UAE-relevant tier (positions 8 to 50), .ae domains and UAE-headquartered sites are well-represented and growing.

For a UAE business, the question is not “should I rank in the global top 10” (you will not), it is “should I rank in the UAE-relevant top 100 for my category”. For that, .ae domain names remain a meaningful positive signal: they tell Google explicitly you are targeting UAE users, and they build trust with UAE customers who increasingly distinguish between local and foreign sellers.

What This Means for UAE Businesses

📋 Register a .ae domain

For a UAE-targeted business, a .ae domain remains the single strongest signal of local presence to both Google and to your customers. It improves local SEO, it raises trust at the moment of purchase decision, and it differentiates you from cross-border sellers competing on price. The cost is a few hundred dirhams per year, the upside is structural.

Register your .ae domain with AEserver.

📋 Host on UAE infrastructure

Loading speed, low latency to UAE users, and Arabic and English support are not nice-to-haves, they are the baseline that determines whether your site competes at all. AEserver hosts in UAE-based data centres with 24/7 local support. Our UAE web hosting plans start from AED 19/month with bundled domain and email, and managed WordPress in Dubai handles the heavier scaling for established stores.

📋 Plan for AI as a discovery channel

If ChatGPT is the third most visited site in the UAE, treating it as the place where customers form opinions and ask for recommendations is no longer optional. That means structured data on your site (so AI systems can quote you), authoritative content with original information (so AI systems prefer you to commodity sources), and presence in the off-site signals AI systems use (Google Business Profile, directory listings, Wikipedia where applicable). We covered the technical foundation in our guide to web design for SEO in Dubai.

📋 Build content for the languages your audience actually reads

A single English-only content strategy under-serves the UAE market. At minimum, English plus Arabic; for many sectors (real estate, healthcare, F&B), Hindi, Malayalam, Urdu, or Tagalog versions can make the difference between a site that converts and one that does not. Our guide on multilingual WordPress sites walks through the technical setup including hreflang and RTL.

📋 Use Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn for B2B and credibility

Reddit (#12 in UAE), Wikipedia (#16), and LinkedIn (#10) are not entertainment platforms, they are credibility infrastructure. Customers Google your brand and check Reddit for honest opinions, check Wikipedia for legitimacy, and check LinkedIn for the people behind the company. Investing in these surfaces is investing in conversion rate, not vanity metrics.

📋 Take e-commerce and BNPL seriously

Amazon.ae’s presence in the top 10 and the rapid rise of Temu confirm that UAE consumers are now fully comfortable buying online. For a UAE business operating its own store, that is good news (the customer education has been done) and bad news (you compete with Amazon and Temu’s logistics). Start with the right foundation: see our e-commerce hosting guide for UAE businesses and our 2025 e-commerce retrospective for the broader market context.

AEserver’s Verdict

The UAE web in 2025 looked exactly like a maturing digital economy should: global platforms still dominate raw traffic (Google, YouTube, Meta), but the local ecosystem grew real depth (Amazon.ae, Khaleej Times, UAE Pass, Noon, Dubizzle, Bayut all visible). The biggest single shift was ChatGPT entering the top 3, which signals that AI moved from novelty to core utility within twenty-four months of public launch.

For UAE businesses planning their digital strategy, the data points to a clear approach: secure a .ae domain, host on UAE infrastructure, optimise for both Google search and AI-generated answers, build content in the languages your customers actually read, and treat e-commerce as a competitive channel rather than a side experiment.

If you want your site on this list one day, the work starts with the foundation. Register a .ae domain and connect UAE hosting with AEserver, or use Spark AI Website Builder to ship a complete WordPress site in under an hour.

Study References

1. Similarweb (April 2026 update, reflecting late 2025 traffic): “Top Websites Ranking in United Arab Emirates”. The primary ordered ranking source. similarweb.com/top-websites/united-arab-emirates/.
2. Similarweb E-commerce Category (UAE): “Top Ecommerce & Shopping Websites Ranking in United Arab Emirates”. Source for the e-commerce sub-ranking. similarweb.com/top-websites/united-arab-emirates/e-commerce-and-shopping/.
3. Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review (December 15, 2025): Cloudflare’s sixth annual review of Internet trends. blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/.
4. Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review: Top Internet Services (January 14, 2026): Detailed breakdown of the global top services with country-level notes including the UAE. blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review-internet-services/.
5. Cloudflare Radar UAE Dashboard: Real-time DNS-based traffic and ranking data for the United Arab Emirates. radar.cloudflare.com/ae.

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