Query Fanouts: How ChatGPT Searches the Web
What Are Query Fanouts?
A query fanout is when ChatGPT breaks a single user prompt into multiple web searches. Instead of running one search, it generates 3–8+ targeted queries, each exploring a different angle of the question, then combines the results into a single answer.
Average Fanouts Per Response
The average number of web search queries ChatGPT generates per response. Higher fanout means ChatGPT is casting a wider net to gather information before answering.
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Fanout Query Vocabulary
The most frequently occurring words in ChatGPT's fanout search queries, organized by type. Larger words appear more often, revealing what kinds of terms ChatGPT prioritizes when searching the web.
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Average Word Count Per Query
The average number of words in each fanout query per day. Longer queries may indicate more specific or complex search behavior.
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Fanouts by Prompt Type
Average fanouts per response broken down by prompt type. Shows whether brand-specific or competitor comparison prompts trigger more or fewer search queries than organic prompts.
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How we collect this data
We collect millions of prompt responses, citations, and click data from the actual user interfaces of major AI platforms — over 1 billion data points and growing. This gives us one of the largest and most authentic datasets on how AI search engines cite sources and recommend brands.
Real UI monitoring
We collect data from the interfaces of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews, and more — the same results hundreds of millions of users see daily.
1B+ data points
Our dataset spans over 1 billion analyzed citations, prompts, and responses — giving us one of the largest AI search datasets available.
Aggregated & public
We publish these reports freely so the GEO and AI search community can learn from the data. All reports are based on aggregated, non-identifiable trends.
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