Glossary
What is Answer engine?
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Short answer
An answer engine is any AI system that responds to a question with a synthesized answer instead of a list of links — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews are all answer engines.
Why it matters
Knowing which systems count as answer engines determines what you have to measure. Testing only ChatGPT and generalising is the most common measurement mistake.
In practice
Answer engines disagree with each other constantly, because they draw on different training data and different live retrieval sources. The same question routinely produces different recommended businesses.
MyFast AI treats seven as the working set: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI and Google AI Overviews.
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