The Fan-Out Phrasebook: what ChatGPT actually types when it searches. Only 1 in 7 responses contained fan-out queries, and in one month those queries leaned harder on "official", "price" and "reviews", while citations moved from Reddit and Wikipedia to the sources themselves.
What words ChatGPT puts in its fan-out queries: share of fan-out queries containing each word, August vs. September 2026. Ring: August. Dot: September. Rows run from the biggest gain to the biggest drop.
The 16 non-place words in Ahrefs' top 20 for September 2026, from 15 million fan-out queries in free, logged-out GPT-5.6 Luna responses. Left out: three country names (india, australia, philippines) and "september", which Ahrefs marks with an unexplained asterisk. Ahrefs describes the "official" figure as a share of English fan-out queries. Gaps here are September minus August as printed, so a few differ by 0.1 pts from Ahrefs' change column (e.g. price: +2.84 pts from the unrounded 6.04% and 8.88%).
ChatGPT site: search operator use: share of site: searches to the ~160 most-searched domains, by type of site, Aug–Sep 2026
A brand site is "a company website like apple.com or ikea.com, as opposed to a retailer, government site, forum, or review site." Shares cover only the ~160 most-searched domains, not all ~116K domains that site: queries pointed at. Values are read from the labels on Ahrefs' chart; 75.9%, 11.9% and 1.9% also appear in its text.
Domains ChatGPT searches most with site: in fan-out queries, number of site: mentions, Aug–Sep 2026
Ranks come from Ahrefs' dataset of around 1 million site: queries. Reddit, ninth, is the only one of OpenAI's 17 licensing partners in the top 150. support.apple.com (2,005) ranks 14th as a separate domain.
Average ChatGPT fan-out queries per prompt or response in four studies. Each label shows how many times the lowest figure it is.
The studies use different models, account types and prompt sets, so their averages are not comparable as a trend. Ahrefs counts only responses that contained fan-outs. Peec's tracking of 20M+ fan-outs in five countries put the range at 2.4 to 2.8 per prompt in early October 2025 and 2.3 to 2.8 in late January 2026.
ChatGPT citation share of OpenAI licensing partners among the 200 most-cited domains, US, 2026
Partners include Dotdash Meredith, Condé Nast, Hearst, News Corp and others with OpenAI content deals. March, July and September are in Ahrefs' text; April, May, June and August are read from its chart labels. September is "late September". Shares are of citations to the top 200 domains, not of all citations.
ChatGPT citation sources by question type, 20,000 US prompts. Ring: comparison questions ("A vs B"). Dot: factual questions (pricing, features, company details).
A separate Ahrefs test of 20,000 US prompts, split by intent. Ahrefs does not give the test's exact dates or the share of prompts in each group.
Reddit ChatGPT citations vs. Wikipedia and YouTube: share of US ChatGPT answers citing each site. Ring: March 2026. Dot: September 2026.
Ahrefs Brand Radar, US ChatGPT citations, 2.4M answers in March and 3.8M in September 2026. Relative drops per Ahrefs: Reddit −88%, Wikipedia −80%, YouTube −27% (from unrounded shares). Promptwatch separately measured Reddit's share of all ChatGPT citations falling from 3.8% (July 18–Aug 7) to 0.5% (Aug 14–17), an 86% drop, which it calls provisional.