Ask.com owns a variety of popular web destinations including country-specific sites for UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and Spain along with Ask For Kids, Teoma (now defunct), Excite, MyWay.com, iWon.com, Bloglines and several others. The combined traffic to its properties places Ask.com in the top ten parent web companies in the US, as rated by both comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings in September 2004.

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where Jeeves is the name of the "gentleman's gentleman", or valet (illustrated by Marcos Sorenson), fetching you answers to any question you ask. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. As time wore on and keyword search engines such as Google rose to prominence, Ask Jeeves suffered a loss of many of its users. The technology was reworked to allow keyword searches as well, but by this time Ask Jeeves had dropped below Google, MSN, and Yahoo! in the size of their userbase.

On 23 September 2005 the company announced plans to phase out the character, and on 27 February 2006 Jeeves was disassociated with Ask.com. A competition was run on Ask for Kids as to what Jeeves should do when he retires. The winner was World Cruises.