Answer engine
An answer engine is a system that responds to a question with a finished answer instead of a list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews are the big ones. It reads sources, synthesises them, and often names the ones it used.
Why it matters
Search engines sent you traffic; answer engines send you reputation. The user often never clicks anything, so the only thing that transfers is whether you were named, and what was said. That changes what "being found" means for a business.
How it works
Under the hood, an answer engine pairs a language model with retrieval: it finds candidate sources, extracts the claims that answer the question, and composes a response with citations. Sources that are structured, specific and corroborated get picked disproportionately often.
What to do about it
Treat answer engines as an audience. Ask them your customers' questions monthly, track when you appear, and shape your key pages so the answer to each question is liftable in one clean block.
