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term: "Answer engine"
canonical: https://citable.wiki/glossary/answer-engine
license: CC BY 4.0
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# Answer engine

**Definition:** An answer engine is a system that responds to a question with a synthesised answer rather than a ranked list of links. Modern answer engines — Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Claude with web search and Microsoft Copilot — retrieve passages from the web and generate the answer with a large language model, usually with citations to the sources used.

The phrase predates large language models: featured snippets and voice assistants were the first answer engines, returning a single passage instead of a list. What changed after 2022 is that the answer is now *generated* — composed from several passages — and that the system attaches citations, which makes "being cited" a measurable outcome.

## Related guides

- [What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?](https://citable.wiki/guides/what-is-answer-engine-optimization)

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Source: https://citable.wiki/glossary/answer-engine