When we ran the Google Trends rising-query report for "meeting notes" in MENA, the numbers came back in a range I had not seen before. Saudi Arabia: search for "ai meeting notes" grew 3,011,100 percent over the past five years. Egypt: "read.ai meeting notes" grew 686,750 percent. The UAE: 418,050 percent on the same Read.ai query. Even the secondary queries — "read.ai meeting notes in teams," "otter ai," "fireflies ai" — all printed growth rates between 126,150 and 316,250 percent. The Knowcap MENA SME Research, June 2026, captured these as part of a 14-row breakout-queries dataset pulled from Google's related_queries → rising endpoint, seeded against "meeting notes" across eight MENA countries. Numbers like these are not noise. They mean a search category that did not exist five years ago is being discovered right now.
What 3,011,100% actually means
A growth rate of 3,011,100 percent sounds impossible until you understand the base. Google Trends scores search interest on a 0-100 scale where 100 is the peak week for that term in that country over the chosen window. The 5-year average score for "Read.ai" in the UAE is 1.0, "Otter.ai" is 0.8, "Fireflies.ai" is 0.2. The 5-year average for "ai meeting notes" in Saudi Arabia rounds to zero on the same scale. What the rising-query report captures is not the absolute volume — it is the curve. The curve is going from "literally nobody searches this" to "thousands of new monthly searches" in a 12-to-24-month window. That is the textbook shape of a category that is forming, before the buyers know what to call the tool they want.
Why the absolute numbers stay small
Hassan's Knowcap MENA SME Research, June 2026, looked at the absolute search interest alongside the rising-query data and confirmed the caveat: this is massive percentage growth from a near-zero base. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE today, "ai meeting notes" is a curiosity query. The 5-year averages across the entire MENA "meeting tools" category sit between 0.0 and 2.7 on the 0-100 scale. By comparison, ChatGPT prints between 22.9 (Qatar) and 33.6 (Morocco) — an order of magnitude bigger. And Odoo prints 25.8 (Jordan) to 57.2 (Egypt) — two orders of magnitude bigger. The category is forming, but it is not big enough today to drive inbound marketing. The growth curve is the leading indicator; the absolute volume will follow in 2027-2028.
What category formation in MENA looks like
When the AI meeting category arrives in the Gulf and the Levant, it does not arrive through SEO. It arrives through three channels Hassan has been tracking: founder-led Instagram content (where Knowcap's posts are already converting MENA SME owners directly), LinkedIn thought leadership written by named operators in Riyadh, Cairo, and Dubai, and MENA tech press — Wamda, MAGNiTT, Forbes Middle East. The Saudi Arabian search curve tells us the market is being primed. The named brands MENA users are discovering first are Read.ai, Otter.ai, and Fireflies — none of which have a MENA presence, none of which transcribe Arabic well, none of which handle the Khaleeji-with-English-business-terms code-switching that every Riyadh boardroom conversation actually sounds like. The window for a MENA-native answer is open right now and will close within 24 months.
What Knowcap is doing with the curve
Knowcap is the MENA-native answer for the rising curve. The product transcribes Arabic, English, and the code-switched mix that every real MENA meeting uses. It extracts decisions and action items in either language. It exports audit-ready records that satisfy KSA PDPL Article 36 requirements, which neither Read.ai nor Otter explicitly address. And it is positioned for the buyer the rising-query data actually identifies: the MENA Odoo implementation Project Manager, the Dubai marketing agency Account Director, the Riyadh audit firm Partner, the Cairo school operations director. The Knowcap MENA SME Research, June 2026, confirmed the vertical sequence — Odoo partners first, agencies and consulting second, regulated verticals (audit, legal, healthcare, edtech) third. The curve is the validation; the verticals are where the first $100,000 of revenue lands.
FAQ
Are the Google Trends growth rates real or methodology artifacts?
Real, with caveats. Google Trends' rising-query metric measures the relative change in search interest between two windows, capped at "Breakout" (5,000%+) for terms growing from zero. The 3,011,100 percent figure for "ai meeting notes" in Saudi Arabia is Google's own number from the related_queries → rising API endpoint, not our calculation. The caveat is the small base: the 5-year average search interest for the meeting-tools category in Saudi Arabia is below 1.0 on Google's 0-100 scale, so the percentage is mathematically explosive but the absolute volume is still in the low hundreds of monthly searches today. The number is the leading indicator of category formation, not the lagging indicator of market size.
Why are MENA users discovering Read.ai before Otter or Fireflies?
Read.ai pushed an aggressive Microsoft Teams integration in 2024 and the MENA enterprise stack is heavily Teams-anchored — Saudi Aramco, Emirates Group, every Big 4 satellite office, most KSA government suppliers. The rising-query data shows this clearly: "read.ai meeting notes in teams" is the second-rising query in both Saudi Arabia (183,200 percent) and the UAE (211,950 percent). Otter and Fireflies are seen as Zoom-native tools, and Zoom is a distant second to Teams in MENA enterprise. The Knowcap MENA SME Research, June 2026, identifies this as the structural reason Read.ai is the brand MENA users encounter first when they finally search for an AI meeting tool.
What does category formation mean for MENA Odoo partners and agencies right now?
It means the buyer journey is not yet "search → compare → buy". The buyer journey is still "see a video on Instagram or LinkedIn → ask a peer → trial → buy". Hassan's view, locked in the Knowcap MENA SME Research, June 2026: outbound and founder-led channels win the next 12 months, search-driven inbound wins the 12 months after that. Operators in Riyadh, Cairo, Dubai, Casablanca, and Amman who adopt the category now — through founder demos, partner referrals, vertical-specific outreach — will have 12-24 months of customer base before search starts driving the bulk of the leads. Waiting for SEO to mature is leaving the early-adopter wedge to the next operator.
Does this growth curve apply to Arabic-language searches too?
Partially. The Knowcap MENA SME Research, June 2026, pulled Arabic-language Google Trends data for the same eight countries. Search interest for "محضر اجتماع" (meeting minutes) in Saudi Arabia averages 8.9 on the 0-100 scale — 5.6 times higher than the highest English meeting-tool query in any MENA country. Egypt prints 7.0 on the same Arabic query, Morocco 2.3, Kuwait 2.0. The Arabic search universe is consistently larger than the English one in the same countries, but it is concentrated on the "how do I write meeting minutes" template need, not on "which AI tool do I buy". The Arabic market wants the workflow before it wants the brand.
Should I wait until the MENA category is bigger before adopting Knowcap?
If you are an Odoo partner, marketing agency, audit firm, school administrator, or real estate broker in MENA, no. The early-adopter window is the cheapest customer-acquisition window the category will ever have. Pricing today reflects the early stage — $30-60 per seat per month for SMEs, scaling with team size. Once the category matures and search volumes catch up to the rising curve, pricing pressure from Read.ai, Otter, and Fireflies entering the MENA market formally will compress the value proposition. The MENA-native moat — Arabic transcription, PDPL audit-trail, code-switching — is at its widest right now.
Try Knowcap
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt are the three countries where the rising-query curve is steepest. Knowcap was built MENA-first for exactly this curve. Start a free trial at app.knowcap.ai/register or read the segment-specific case at knowcap.ai/for/odoo-partners if you run an Odoo implementation practice.