PractitionerLily Ray, 17 Aug 2026
The share of ChatGPT fan-out queries needing a second iteration rose from about 5% to 33.5% when 5.6 became default.
Optimisation methods
33.5%
of ChatGPT prompts needed a second fan-out iteration after version 5.6, up from 5% before
- Reader Note:
- From David Konitzny at Peec AI, measured around the day ChatGPT 5.6 became the default, so it is a before-and-after snapshot of one version change rather than a trend. It sits in the same reading as single-query fan-outs falling from 94.0% to 43.5% and retrieved sources doubling from about 12 to 24.
- 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.




