answer engine
A system that returns a composed answer with citations rather than a list of links.
What answer engine does not show
Its retrieval step is what a site can influence; its generation step is not.
How CrawlCheck measures answer engine
One finding code measures it. Its share of all scans is computed from the live corpus when this page is served, not typed into it.
| Finding code | Share of scans | Guide |
|---|---|---|
ANSWER_ENGINE_REFUSED | 6.2% | Is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers on your site? |
Every code, its rule and its current rate: the dataset page. Scan a site to see which apply to it.
Where answer engine comes up on this site
- Is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers on your site?Across the public dataset, robots.txt allows an answer engine while the edge refuses it on of scans, and an AI opt-out is already set on .
- How to check if AI crawlers can read your siteA refusal like that, where robots.txt allows an answer engine and the edge turns it away, appears on of scans.
- Do AI crawlers and agents respect robots.txt?Your robots.txt invites every answer engine; your edge then refuses them.
- Does llms.txt work? What is known and how to test itThe constraints are upstream: crawlers served a stale cached object, pages that are overwhelmingly code, and sites that refuse at least one answer engine outright.
- GEO vs AEO vs LLM SEO: the terms, and what is measurableAnswer engine optimization (AEO) is the same aim with the emphasis on being the direct answer, from featured snippets to assistants.
Terms this definition uses
Definitions that name answer engine
payload ratio · citation · retrieval · PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User · IndexNow · datacenter IP · AI answer reading · name confusion
Related terms in Answer engines and retrieval
How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
AEO · GEO · AI visibility score · share of voice · prompt set · brand mention · RAG · grounding · training data · embedding · chunking · context window · token · hallucination · refusal · AI Overview · citation · retrieval · hallucinated attribution · Hybrid search · Re-ranking · Passage ranking · Query fan-out · Chunk boundary · BM25 · cross-encoder · AI Mode · information gain · dense retrieval
Questions about answer engine
What is answer engine?
A system that returns a composed answer with citations rather than a list of links.
What does answer engine not show or guarantee?
A system that returns a composed answer with citations rather than a list of links. Its retrieval step is what a site can influence; its generation step is not.
How does CrawlCheck measure answer engine?
Through the finding code ANSWER_ENGINE_REFUSED, each with a stated rule, evidence bytes and a live share of scans on the dataset page.
Which area of the glossary does answer engine belong to?
Answer engines and retrieval: How a generated answer gets made, and what your page is competing for inside it.
← AI Overview · citation →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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