Answer engine
What is an Answer Engine vs. a Search Engine?
A search engine returns a list of links. An answer engine, such as Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, reads pages and writes one response from the facts it extracted. The page that is cited is the one whose fact was easy to lift.
What changes for the page
A list of links rewards a URL that ranks. An answer rewards a passage that states the fact. The same site can serve both, but the passage has to be in the HTML that was fetched.
- A search result points at a page.
- An answer engine quotes a passage and names the source.
- The passage has to exist before any JavaScript runs.
Related terms
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