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Before answering a question, ChatGPT searches the web — not with your question, but with several shorter searches of its own. Your prompt “best CRM for a 10-person sales team” might become “best CRM small business 2026”, “CRM pricing comparison” and “Meridian vs Northpeak small team”. These are its query fan-outs. Growth Mention records them for every answer that has them.

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Why they matter

The fan-outs are the searches that decided which pages ChatGPT read before answering. If your pages rank for those searches, they’re in the pool the answer is built from. If they don’t, you’re relying on other sites to mention you. That makes fan-outs the bridge between AI visibility and ordinary search: they’re a list of real queries, chosen by the assistant, that you can check your rankings for and write content against.

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Where to find them

  • Query Fanouts in the sidebar lists your prompts, with how many searches each one triggered. Click one to see every search the assistant ran for it, across all its answers, with how many times it ran each one.
  • In any single answer, the Searches run panel shows the fan-outs for that answer. See Reading the answers.
Both follow the date range and segment filters.
Query Fanouts by Prompt: how many searches ChatGPT ran for each prompt
The searches run for one prompt, each with the number of times it was run

The searches ChatGPT ran for “What's the best note-taking app for a small team?”, most frequent first.

Read the list the way you’d read keyword research. Searches that recur — here “Notion team wiki collaboration official” or “best note taking apps small teams … 2026” — are the ones the assistant leans on every time, and the pages ranking for them are what it reads. Searches that name a competitor (“Microsoft Loop collaboration workspaces official”) show who it’s checking you against.

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Which assistants provide them

Fan-outs come from ChatGPT, which runs searches for practically every answer. The other assistants don’t expose the searches behind their answers, so theirs have none.