How LLMs Use Fan-Out Queries to Navigate the Web
Inside 100,000 Prompts
How LLMs Use Fan-Out Queries to Navigate the Web
When you ask ChatGPT a question, it seems to answer instantly.
Yet, behind the scenes, the model often generates “fan-out queries” – additional search terms that expand the original prompt – and uses them to explore different angles of the topic across the web.
Yet, behind the scenes, the model often generates “fan-out queries” – additional search terms that expand the original prompt – and uses them to explore different angles of the topic across the web.
For SEO and GEO, these unseen research paths may be the key to being discovered by LLMs, and the first step toward entering the model’s citation pipeline.
To examine this hidden layer of AI discovery, we analyzed 100,000 ChatGPT prompts and 100,249 fan-out queries, randomly selected from DataForSEO’s proprietary database powering LLM Mentions API.