No AI answers on Persian search: we measured 59 result pages

The method, so you can repeat it

Every request went to the DataForSEO organic results endpoint with three parameters: language fa, depth 20, and location code 20498. Fifty-six of the queries are terms we compete on ourselves. The last three were pulled fresh on 18 August so nobody could say the data had gone stale in the drawer.

Each result comes back as a list of items, and every item declares a type: organic, paid, ai_overview, featured_snippet, video, and so on. Counting is the easy part.

The number that matters more than the table: in 46 of the 56, the first organic listing was also the first thing on the page. Nothing sat above it at all. Eight had a featured snippet on top, one a knowledge graph, one a video block, one an image pack.

How we know the tool is not simply blind

This is the obvious objection, and without an answer the rest of the article is worthless. So we ran a control: same endpoint, same day, same depth, but language en and location 2840, which is the United States, on the query what is seo.

That response contained ai_overview.

The tool sees AI answers and reports them. Their absence from Persian results is a property of the data, not of the instrument. One extra request is the whole difference between a measurement and a hunch.

The thing we got wrong for months

Everyone treats location code 20498 as "Iran". We did too. Then we pulled the full location list and found exactly one row carrying the country code IR:

• location_code: 20498
• location_name: East Azerbaijan Province, Iran
• location_type: Province
• location_code_parent: 2364

So 20498 is a province, not a country. There is no country-level row for Iran, and sending the parent code 2364 returns 40501 Invalid Field: location_code. Two neighbouring services behave the same way: Google Ads volume for 20498 returns 50301 Internal error, and the Labs endpoints reject the code outright, with Iran missing from their 94 supported locations.

Google confirms the localisation without being asked. Among the related searches returned for the Persian phrase for "online shop design", the top two suggestions named Tabriz and Urmia, both cities in that province.

We are writing this down for precision, not to undermine the count. Fifty-nine Persian result pages from one Iranian province are still fifty-nine Persian result pages. But anybody quoting an "Iran search volume" figure should know exactly what was measured, and until this week we were not stating it carefully enough ourselves. The tool-by-tool version of that table lives on our SEO tools page.

What to do with the number

Start with what not to do. Do not rewrite your pages for an answer box your audience is not being shown. The advice circulating right now (chunk everything, front-load the answer in thirty words, publish a file for the crawlers) was written for a market where that box exists. Google's own AI features guidance says the same thing in gentler words: there is no new work to do, the existing rules still apply.

Our position: in Persian search, position one is still position one and still takes the click. Something else is taking yours. In that same crawl, the median HTML weight of the sites ranking on those queries was 349 KB and the heaviest was 3 MB. Three megabytes is not competing with an AI answer. It is competing with the visitor's patience.

The order of work has not changed. First a page that opens. Then a page that answers the question. Then everything else. If yours has not cleared the first step, making a heavy page lighter beats anything else you could do this quarter, and if there is no site worth optimising yet, building one properly comes before tuning the one you have.

Run it yourself

You do not have to take our word for any of this. With a DataForSEO account it is one request and four tenths of a cent:

POST https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/serp/google/organic/live/advanced
[{"location_code":20498,"language_code":"fa","keyword":"قالب وردپرس","depth":20}]

Search the items array for ai_overview and paid. No account, no problem: type the query into Google and look at what sits above the first blue link.

How long this holds

Until Google decides otherwise, and nobody outside Google knows when. We measured on 18 August 2026 and we will date every repeat of it on this page.

Three limits, stated plainly, because without them the count reads bigger than it is:

• This is one vendor's scrape, not your browser. A surface the vendor does not capture is a surface we did not see.
• Google's conversational mode and in-browser assistants are a different layer, and we did not measure them at all.
• All 59 queries were commercial and drawn from our own field. Medical or news queries may behave differently.

Questions we get

Does this mean Google's AI is switched off for Iran?

It means that across 59 Persian result pages, no AI answer block appeared above the results. That is not the same claim. Other Google services may well be reachable. We are only reporting what we saw on the results page.

Why were there no ads either?

No item of type paid came back in any of the 56 queries. We are not going to guess at the reason, because we have no way to confirm one. We report the absence and stop there.

So should we ignore AI search optimisation entirely?

For your Persian-speaking audience it is not this quarter's priority. If you also sell to customers abroad the picture changes, and it is the English version of your site that needs to be ready for it.

Can this be repeated on my own keywords?

Yes, and the full method is above. If you would rather not touch an API, running exactly this measurement is part of what our SEO service does.