Answer engine

The shift from search engine to answer engine changes what businesses are competing for. A results page gave you ten chances to be seen and a click to be won; an answer gives you one or two sentences, a handful of names, and often no click at all. Answer engines also compose their responses from sources the user never sees unless they expand the citations, so the businesses named in answers are chosen by the engine's reading of the web, not by the user's scanning of a page. That concentrates the winner-takes-most effect: engines tend to repeat the same few names for a topic. Being one of those names, for the questions that bring you customers, is what page-one used to buy you, and few businesses are competing for it yet.