[9] WolframAlpha gathers data from academic and commercial websites such as the CIA's The World Factbook, the United States Geological Survey, a Cornell University Library publication called All About Birds, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Dow Jones, the Catalogue of Life,[1] CrunchBase,[10] Best Buy,[11] and the FAA to answer queries.

WolframAlpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data that come from other sites and books.

[15][16] For factual question answering, WolframAlpha was used by Apple's Siri in October 2011 and Amazon Alexa in December 2018 for math and science queries.

[17][18] Users noticed that the Wolfram Integration for Siri was changed in June 2013 to use Bing to query certain results on iOS 7.

[19] Starting with iOS 17, it was reported that Wolfram for Siri no longer answers mathematical equations, instead defaulting to web search queries with no notable explanation.