Skip to content
PractitionerLily Ray, 17 Aug 2026

ChatGPT decides which brands to consider before it even looks at web search results: Brands named in the initial fan-out query were cited in ChatGPT answers 33 times more often.

Citation & visibility tracking

33x

greater chance a brand named in ChatGPT's first fan-out query is cited versus a page only fetched

Reader Note:
The two figures being divided are not the same kind of thing: 68.9% is how often brands named in the fan-out were cited, 2.1% is how often pages that were only fetched were cited. One counts brands, the other counts pages, so the 33-fold ratio is not a like-for-like comparison. It also shows an association rather than a sequence. That cited brands tend to appear in the fan-out does not establish that the fan-out settled the answer before retrieval happened.
Evidence:
Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:
Low
Sample:
Mixed and not standardized. The article combines the author's own observations with third-party studies, including about 4,000 prompts in one cited dataset, 27 conversations and 3,554 retrieved pages in another, and roughly 20 prompts in one of the author's examples.

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

Not for

  • Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
  • This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
  • The source never says how this number was measured.
  • The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

Go deeper on this topic

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers
Citation & visibility trackingTrend

Only about 17% of AI Overview citations also rank in the organic top 10, while just over half are somewhere in the top 100.

Vendor report

BrightEdge, 12 Feb 2026

Only about 17% of AI Overview citations also rank in the organic top 10, while just over half are somewhere in the top 100.

Coming soon

This feature isn’t available yet.