# AI search engine **Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/ai-search-engine > An AI search engine answers a user's query by retrieving relevant web sources and synthesising a cited answer with a language model — the category that includes Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Claude with web, and Gemini AI Overviews. --- An AI search engine answers a user's query by retrieving relevant web sources and synthesising a cited answer with a language model — the category that includes Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Claude with web, and Gemini AI Overviews. AI search engines (sometimes called answer engines) replaced the "list of links" with "synthesised cited answer" in 2025-2026. The pipeline: query rewriting, web search (sometimes proprietary index, sometimes Bing or Google), retrieval of top documents, synthesis with citations by a strong LLM. Major players: Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Claude with web, Gemini AI Overviews, You.com, Brave Leo, Phind. For content publishers, ranking in AI search citations is the new SEO frontier — see llms.txt and our schema upgrades on this site for one example of the publisher-side response. ## Common mistakes - Treating AI search engines as a single audience — each one has its own crawler, ranking, and citation behaviour. - Ignoring AI search citations in publisher analytics — they convert differently from organic search. ## Related terms - [rag](https://promtable.com/glossary/rag) - [grounding](https://promtable.com/glossary/grounding) - [semantic-search](https://promtable.com/glossary/semantic-search) - [embeddings](https://promtable.com/glossary/embeddings) *Last updated: 2026-06-01* --- Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/ai-search-engine Maintained by Promtable (https://promtable.com). Content: CC BY 4.0. Cite as "Promtable — https://promtable.com/glossary/ai-search-engine". Contact: info@vibecodingturkey.com.