> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.peec.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# ChatGPT fan-outs doubled in length in four months

> Peec's 20M fan-out analysis — average QFO word count rose from ~6 words in Oct 2025 to ~12 by Jan 2026, uniformly across countries and languages, while fan-outs per prompt stayed constant at 2.3–2.8.

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](https://peec.ai/blog/country-analysis-20-million-search-qfos), 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](/research/gpt-56-retrieval-changes). Definition: [What is a query fan-out](/research/what-is-a-query-fanout).

**Source:** [ChatGPT fan-outs have doubled in length in 4 months](https://peec.ai/blog/country-analysis-20-million-search-qfos), Peec (Tom Wells), Feb 2026.