ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Claude are all answer engines. They share a common property: the user gets a written answer first, with sources and links second. This inverts the SEO contract, ranking on the SERP no longer guarantees the click, and is the reason AI visibility tracking exists as a discipline.
AI visibility glossary
Answer engine
An answer engine is an AI system that synthesises a direct answer to a user query, typically grounded by retrieved sources, instead of returning a ranked list of links.