Answer engines

No. They use different underlying models and have their own preferences. The research from a 2025 AEO study shows what that looks like in practice. Answer engines heavily prefer earned media over brand pages, and they reuse those sources across paraphrases, languages, and business verticals. In the smartphone and laptop tests, Google pulled in brand, social, and earned sources in something close to balance, while AI engines leaned as high as 92 percent toward earned outlets.

A Harvard and OpenAI study found 21.3% of prompts are "search-like.", That's roughly 66 million search-intent prompts per day or 24.09 billion a year. This is however almost nothing compared to googles 5 trillion searches in 2025, or about 14 billion per day. So Google's AI overview is the answer engine with most traffic.

Generally no. Optimizing for one might help with others (due to general good practices such as E-E-A-T), but they are separate systems.