Answer engine
A system that answers a question in prose instead of returning a ranked list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI search panels.
Updated
An answer engine is a system that responds to a question with a written answer instead of a ranked list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the AI panels now sitting above classic results.
The structural difference from a search engine is the number of slots. A results page has ten and a scroll; an answer has two or three names and no position four. There is no long tail of visibility below the fold, and the click may never happen at all, which changes what winning looks like from being on the page to being in the sentence.
Which ones does WellCited sample?
Three: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. They have public interfaces, they cite differently enough from each other to be worth separating, and between them they cover the assistants a B2B buyer is realistically asking.
They are sampled rather than checked, because the same question asked twice can return different companies. One run is an anecdote; a rate across repeated runs against an unchanged prompt set is a measurement.
Now run it on yours.
Same seven checks, same ten seconds, still no signup.
No signup, no card. We read only what a crawler reads.