How Answer Engines Work!
When you ask ChatGPT to recommend the best over-ear headphones for working out, what actually happens? How do AI answer engines generate their answers and pick their product recommendations? How are they different from traditional search engines like Google (and where do they overlap)? And crucially, how can you help your website, brand, and products to show up?
What are answer engines?
Answer engines (or AI search engines) are question-answering systems that use large language models (LLMs) to find information and generate responses.
There are some key differences between traditional search engines and answer engines (although these differences are shrinking as traditional search engines incorporate more AI features):
Instead of entering one-off queries, users can ask follow-up questions and keep the conversation going.
Instead of returning a ranked list of links, AI search engines provide direct answers and recommendations (and these answers can change regularly).
Instead of sending searchers to visit your website, users have their queries answered directly in the chat interface (resulting in fewer clicks back to your website).
How training works
LLMs are trained on huge amounts of content. They have effectively “read” all of Wikipedia, all of the Common Crawl Dataset, all of Google Books, and many millions upon millions of pages of web content.
This training data helps provide the LLM with its “understanding” of the world. If your headphone company appears many times in its training data, in relevant contexts and alongside positive descriptors (“best value”, “great for the gym”, and so on), there’s a good chance your company will be mentioned in the LLM’s responses to headphone-related prompts.