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ChatGPT’s query fan-outs roughly doubled in length between October 2025 and January 2026. Peec analyzed over 20 million ChatGPT fan-outs across countries (full study, Feb 2026):
  • Average word count rose from ~6 words (Oct 2025) to ~12 words (Jan 2026), with a brief peak of ~16 words around calendar week 49 of 2025.
  • The trend is uniform across countries and languages — Germany, UK, Singapore, Thailand, US all follow the same curve, confirmed by character counts. ChatGPT’s algorithm changes apply globally, unlike Google organic search, which varies by locale.
  • Fan-outs per prompt stayed roughly constant: 2.4–2.8 per prompt in early October 2025, 2.3–2.8 in late January 2026. ChatGPT makes each query more precise rather than running more queries.
Two likely reasons: longer queries give vector-embedding retrieval and re-ranking richer signals to match against, and more specific queries cut through an internet increasingly saturated with AI-generated content. Implication for content: broad, generic pages struggle to match increasingly specific fan-outs; detailed content addressing specific intents gains retrieval advantage. Note that GPT-5.6 (Aug 2026) later changed the fan-out count picture substantially — see GPT-5.6 retrieval changes. Definition: What is a query fan-out. Source: ChatGPT fan-outs have doubled in length in 4 months, Peec (Tom Wells), Feb 2026.