Profound: ChatGPT Query Fanout Study

Key Takeaways:

• Profound analyzed ChatGPT citations for the used queries (Query Fanout) for 420 prompts (97 single-query, 323 multi-query) to compare how they were influenced by Google's Top 10 for the queries

• Findings:

  • First Queries significantly rely more heavily on Google's Top 10 while further queries source citations from beyond (e.g. other sources such as Reddit, Wikipedia aso. or Google's Top 30, Top 100 or even Bing, Brave and others)

  • In middle and last queries ranking higher in the Top 10 or ranking in the Top 10 becomes less important

• Discussions:

  • Ray: Still, SEO measures apply for rankings beyond Google's Top 10

  • Kronenberg: Obviously LLM Chats such as ChatGPT aim at providing answers and thus focus on citable snippets and unique information instead of pages to refer users to - especially for middle queries

  • Is ChatGPT only using Google? Might the difference be due to it using other sources or search engines as well?

Sources:

• https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/chatgpt-query-fanout-explained

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joshua-blyskal_we-just-completed-one-of-the-worlds-most-share-7394014623890579456-czJa/