Answer engines
Answer engines are AI-Powered search tools that utilize Large Language Models to provide synthesized, natural language answers rather than a list of links. This include the known chat bots such as ChatGPT, Gemeni, Claude & Perplexity, but also Google's AI Overview.
Why It Matters
These tools represent the new frontier where users navigate to for information discovery and recommendation. As a brand you can not just focus on google anymore. Each and one are the direct targets when perforiming Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
How We Use It at Soprano
We test our content on all of them. We don't just check Google; we ensure cross-platform authority. We treat collect and store data for each tool, they are unique answer engines with its own preferences.
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FAQ
Are they all the same when it comes to AEO?
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.
Which one is most important?
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 trafic.
Do they share data?
Do they share data?