Answer engine

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.