Wolfram|Alpha: Computed Answers, Not Web Search

Wolfram|Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that computes answers from its own edited data, the Wolfram Knowledgebase, and does not search the web. A website cannot rank in it, and it documents no crawler to allow or block. If you have data that belongs in it, you can suggest the data to its team.

How Wolfram|Alpha gets its answers

The Wolfram|Alpha FAQ says that Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine. It does computations from the Wolfram Knowledgebase instead of searching the web and returning links. The FAQ also says that Wolfram|Alpha does not get its data from the web:

• The data comes from the internal knowledgebase.
• Some of that data comes from official public or private websites, but most comes from systematic primary sources.
• The Wolfram|Alpha team combines the data and reviews it.

Each relevant results page has a Sources button. It lists background sources and references.

Who makes it

Wolfram Alpha LLC is a privately held spinoff of Wolfram Research, Inc., the company behind Mathematica and the Wolfram Language (FAQ). A team led by Stephen Wolfram built it.

Wolfram|Alpha in AI tools

AI apps can call the Wolfram|Alpha LLM API at https://www.wolframalpha.com/api/v1/llm-api. It returns plain-text results for a language model, with a link back to the full results page on wolframalpha.com. So an AI tool that uses Wolfram|Alpha gets a wolframalpha.com link to show as the source.

The FAQ says that you cite Wolfram|Alpha itself as the source, with the time or place of the query, because they can change the result.

What a site owner can do

• Wolfram|Alpha does not crawl the web for its answers. There is no Wolfram|Alpha token for robots.txt.
• If you have data that belongs in Wolfram|Alpha, send it to the Wolfram|Alpha team. Use the feedback form at the bottom of a results page, or the contact page. The Wolfram|Alpha team reviews all of its data, so every contribution goes through a data review.