Konitzny & Rudzki: ChatGPT GPT-6 replaced GPT-5.6 as Default Model & ?utm Bug
Key Takeaways:
On October 9th ChatGPT changed its default model from GPT-5.6 to GPT-6
Konitzny from Peec AI analyzed the chnages in the retrieval on 5.7 million fan-out queries and 2.2 million ChatGPT responses:
Fanout Query Behavior in general changed significantly:
Fan-outs per chat drop from 3 to 2 (−40%)
Half of all fan-outs now contain 11+ words, up from 27%
site: queries fall from 22.6% to 8.3% (−63%)
Quoted-phrase queries fall from 9.9% to 2.4% (−76%)
Fanout Queries are more Comparison-oriented and question-phrased:
“official” doubles from 12.3% to 24.6%
“compare” and “comparison” triple from 1.9% to 5.7%
“vs” more than doubles from 1.7% to 3.7%
Question phrasing more than doubles from 4.0% to 9.8%
ChatGPT introduced Intelligent UI with which links are more prominently placed, and more likely including direct links, logos or imagery:
Now 42% of chats contain direct links to a website instead of 8-10% before (4x increase)
Otteryl found that with GPT-6 their brand is way less mentioned text-only and more likely includes a hyperlink
More cirtical citing in answers that cite listicles or comparison pages:
6x increase of chats that question comparison/ranking pages from 0.56% to 3.46% of chats
"This is not an independently verified ranking. Most of the results come from the agencies themselves."
"This comparison is based on information provided by the vendors, not independent testing."
2x increase of chats that point out promotional interest from 1.0% to 2.3% of chats
"These accuracy figures come from the vendor and haven't been independently verified."
"These case studies were published by the company itself, which has an interest in promoting its products."
Answers include follow-up questionnaires way more likely: Now 22.1% instead of 0.1% before
The UTM-Bug: Rudzki similarly to others posted about the bug that ChatGPT changed how they included links that did not include the parameter utm=chatgpt.com from 9th to 16th October
therefore, traffic from ChatGPT likely was tracked as Direct (GA4)
reported traffic from ChatGPT dropped by approx. 37%
the bug was fixed on 16th of October for most traffic bounce back to previous levels while I saw increases due to the newly introduced Intelligent UI or rather the increased number of links in answers
Sources:
