Our newsletterPractitionerLily Ray, 17 Aug 2026
The average number of fan-out queries per prompt jumped to 7.5 in ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, up from 2.17 in the 2025 baseline.
Optimisation methods
7.5
average fan-out queries per prompt for ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, up from 2.17 in the 2025 baseline
- Reader Note:
- From Chris Long at Nectiv, comparing roughly 4,000 prompts on 5.6 Sol against his own 2025 baseline — so the two sides are separate runs by the same person, not a controlled test. The same reading puts the longest query chain at 29 searches against 4 before, and site: in 64% of queries. That 64% sits against about 23% in Peec AI's separate measurement of the same operator, reported a few lines away in the article, and the piece does not reconcile them.
- 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.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample: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.
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