Our newsletterPractitionerLily Ray, 17 Aug 2026
ChatGPT now uses the site: operator in about 23% of fan-out searches, up from just 0.3% before.
Optimisation methods
23%
of ChatGPT fan-out queries now include the site: operator, up from 0.3% before version 5.6
- 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. The same reading puts single-query fan-outs down from 94.0% to 43.5%, retrieved sources up from about 12 to 24, and second iterations up from about 5% to 33.5%. Chris Long's separate dataset in the same article puts site: in 64% of queries, nearly three times this 23%. The piece does not reconcile the two.
- 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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