A system that returns a synthesized answer instead of a list of links.
An answer engine is a search system that responds to a query with a direct, synthesized answer rather than a ranked list of links. Examples include ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Because answer engines typically cite only a few sources, visibility depends on being one of the handful of pages the engine chooses to quote, the central challenge that AEO addresses.