Qwant offers several types of results in the same search: classic websites, merchant websites, news webs not based on information related to the user's profile.

In its early days, the Qwant search engine relied on to provide more relevant results. In 2016, Qwant claimed to be increasingly using its own results from its own exploration robots. It is still at the status of a hybrid engine. In 2020, Qwant claimed to have exceeded 50% of independent results for web searches, and 70% for all researchs.

Qwant's business model is partly based on through contextual advertising. It also has partnerships with companies such as TripAdvisor, PagesJaunes and DeepL. These serve to enrich the results, such as by DeepL providing its translation service directly on the Qwant results page. Qwant's results are further augmented by the integration of application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by third-party companies, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Qwant's extension for Mozilla Firefox is on the list of free software recommended by the French State as part of the overall modernization of its information systems. It is mentioned there that it is published under MIT/X11 license, but the engine itself is not open source.