Answer Engine
An answer engine is a system that responds to a query with a direct synthesised answer rather than a list of links to sources.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews are all answer engines. They differ in how they retrieve and how readily they name businesses, but they share the defining behaviour: the user receives a conclusion rather than a set of candidates to evaluate.
The consequence is a collapse in the number of businesses visible per query. A search results page shows ten organic results plus ads; an answer typically names two or three. Everyone else is invisible, regardless of how well they would have ranked.
Why it matters
Every business with a discovery channel through search is exposed to this shift. The question is not whether answer engines matter but whether you are among the few names they use.