Our newsletterPractitionerLily Ray, 17 Aug 2026
ChatGPT now runs more fan-out searches per prompt, with free and cheaper tiers catching up to higher-tier models.
Optimisation methods
- Reader Note:
- This is the author's summary across several third-party datasets rather than a measurement of her own, and no figure is attached to the free-tier part of it at all. The supporting numbers elsewhere in the piece come from different people on different samples: Chris Long at Nectiv on roughly 4,000 prompts, David Konitzny at Peec AI on prompt-level shares, and the Resoneo team on citation counts.
- Evidence:
- Expert judgment
- 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
Hearing how someone who knows the field reads it, and deciding what to check yourself.
Not for
- Anything that needs a measurement. Nobody counted or tested this.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
- The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
- The source never says how this number was measured.
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