Search results
Search results are the pages, links and answers a search engine shows in reply to a search.
Search results are what a search engine shows you after you search: the list of pages it thinks best match your words, plus whatever else it adds, like ads, maps, videos, product listings or an AI answer. All of it together sits on the search engine results page.
For a marketer, search results are the shop window. Where you appear, how your listing looks and what sits above you decide how many people click through.
Organic, paid and the rest
The organic results are the pages the search engine ranks on their merits. You can't pay to move them. Paid results are ads, bought by the click and marked as sponsored. Everything else is a feature Google adds when it thinks it helps, such as a map for local searches or a row of product listings for shopping ones.
Each organic result has a title, a web address and a short description, which Google writes from your page. Google explains how it picks the title in its guide to title links.
Search results behind AI answers
Many AI answers are built on search results the person never sees. When an AI platform searches the web before it answers, it runs its own searches, reads some of the results, and writes one reply from them. The person sees the answer and perhaps a few links, and not the list the platform looked at.
For example, someone asks ChatGPT for the best coffee subscription for an office. It might search "office coffee subscription UK" and "Fernhill Coffee reviews," read pages from both lists, and name three brands. Ranking well in those background searches is how a page gets read.
In AnswerOrbit
Open an answer in Answers to see the pages it used, with the ones it linked to marked as cited. On ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot you'll also see the searches it ran before answering. The Searches tab in Sources shows how often each platform searched, and how often you were named when it did.