What is Answer Engine?
- Answer Engine
- An answer engine is a system that responds to a query with a written answer rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews are answer engines: each retrieves or recalls information, composes a response, and in most cases cites the sources it used.
01 In practice
The defining behaviour is synthesis. A search engine finds documents and ranks them, leaving the reader to open and compare; an answer engine reads across sources and writes a single response, then may or may not attribute it.
For a business, the consequence is that being findable is no longer the same as being visible. A page can rank first in search and never be quoted, because the model retrieving it could not parse the content, or found a clearer version of the same claim on a source it trusts more.
See where you stand
Can the assistants read your site?
The free checker fetches your site the way ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do, and scores what comes back across twenty-three checks.