What are ChatGPT's four kinds of fan-out query?

Published 11 November 2026. Updated 12 November 2026.

ChatGPT's fan-out queries come in four kinds: web searches, business searches for local places, image searches and find lines. The first three go out to a search source, while a find line looks for a word inside a page ChatGPT has already opened, so it is the one kind no page can come up for.

The kinds sit inside step 2 of how ChatGPT, Claude and Grok search the web, where the model writes its own queries. This page takes each kind in turn: how to spot it, what it went looking for, and what it means for your pages. The examples come from two ChatGPT conversations we recorded in September 2026 while building Only Fan Out, set beside what other researchers have published.

How do you tell ChatGPT's four kinds of query apart?

By the first word of each search line. In many turns since August 2026, ChatGPT has written its searches as short lines with fields split by a pipe, and the first field names the kind.

Kind	Line starts with	What ChatGPT looks for	Other fields we have seen
Web	fast|	Ordinary web results	A number read as a recency window in days, and sometimes a domain
Business	business|	Local places	A location in a field of its own, and several queries joined by semicolons
Image	image|	Pictures	The same recency number as a web line
Find	find|	A word or phrase inside a page already open	None that matter: no new search goes out

OpenAI's own web search guide for developers draws the same line for its API. A search step there can run a search, open a page, or take the action find_in_page, "which represents searching within a page." The guide also says web search "can return image results alongside regular text results," returned apart from the answer text.

What did one real ChatGPT turn send?

Seventeen queries across three search calls, from a single request. On 9 September 2026 we recorded ChatGPT's thinking model answering a request for local business recommendations in Singapore, in a conversation saved before ChatGPT stopped keeping query text.

Kind	Queries	Share of the turn
Business	7	41%
Web	7	41%
Image	3	18%

The lines held more than query words:

• The business searches carried "Singapore" in a field of its own, apart from the query words.
• One business line held three queries separated by semicolons.
• The first call asked for a recency window of 30, and later lines asked for 365.
• The second call put three business names in quotes, names the first call had turned up.

A second recording, saved on 14 September 2026, ran three queries, each narrowed to a single website with site:. Narrowing to one site lives inside the query text or the domain field of a web line, so we count those searches as web queries. Our post on how ChatGPT uses site: searches lines up the published counts of how often that happens.

What is a web query in ChatGPT?

A search of the open web, written on a line that starts fast|. Suganthan Mohanadasan read these lines on his own ChatGPT Plus account in August 2026 and set out the format as the query, then a number, then an optional domain, as in fast|Zendesk AI agents pricing 2026|30|zendesk.com. He reads the number as a freshness window in days and says that reading is his assumption. The values he saw ran from 2 for a share price to 3,650 for a Reddit search.

ChatGPT does not hold strictly to the window. Christian Ott's write-up of the freshness window (September 2026) reports from Peec AI's data that about 65 percent of pages retrieved for a 30-day request fell inside the window. The same piece reports a slow| line in about 14 percent of search lines in that data.

For a site owner, web lines are the ones to study first. They hold the phrasing a page needs to come up for, and the recency number tells you whether a page last touched months ago is likely to be passed over for that question.

What is a business query in ChatGPT?

A look-up of local places, written on a line that starts business|. Every business line we and Mohanadasan have seen carried a location. Mohanadasan saw it run in two steps on a coffee question in Dubai: first search phrases, then the names of the places the first step returned, which ChatGPT then checked with quoted web searches. Our 9 September turn followed the same pattern, as the list above shows.

Where the place data comes from is not documented by OpenAI. RESONEO's study of what ChatGPT pulls, shows and cites (July 2026) identified local and map results from Yelp, Tripadvisor and Google Maps by the format of their IDs.

A business line means ChatGPT went to place data for the answer as well as to web pages. If you run a local business, check that your business name, address and opening hours match across your site and your listings, so the quoted follow-up search finds the same name it was given.

What is an image query in ChatGPT?

A search for pictures, written on a line that starts image|, which can carry the same recency number as a web line. In our 9 September turn, three of the seventeen queries were image searches. Mohanadasan saw one fire next to the places lookup on his coffee question.

An image search can reach your pictures without your server seeing a visit. RESONEO reports that ChatGPT re-hosts images at OpenAI, so they never touch the publisher's server. The levers you control are on the page: descriptive file names and alt text, and text near the image that names what it shows.

Why is a find query not a search?

Because it never leaves the pages ChatGPT already has. A find line looks for a word or phrase inside a page ChatGPT opened earlier in the turn, the same action OpenAI's guide calls searching within a page. No search source is asked and no new results come back.

That changes how you count. Drop find lines before you total a turn's queries or compare turns, or a turn that searched twice and read closely looks busier than one that searched five times. Keep the word itself, though. It tells you which fact ChatGPT went hunting for on a page it had chosen to open. If a page of yours was opened and left uncited, our post on why ChatGPT read your page but did not cite it covers what to check.

What else shows up besides the four kinds?

Mohanadasan's August 2026 recordings show three other kinds of line in ChatGPT's search steps, and none of them is a search you can rank for.

Line	What it does	What it means for a site
product|	Looks up named products, several joined by semicolons. Mohanadasan saw it on robot vacuums and mattresses, not software	The results show as product cards with price, rating and merchant, kept apart from the cited sources
genui_run|	Calls a widget, such as a stock chart or a football fixture list, with settings in JSON	The answer shows an interface, so there is no page to cite
length|	Sets how much text comes back per result: long, medium or short	A setting for the results. Leave it out of your list of queries

ChatGPT has also written the same calls as JSON, with each query under search_query, and has switched between the two shapes more than once in 2026. Our guide to finding ChatGPT's fan-out queries in Chrome DevTools shows where both shapes sit in the answer stream.

How do you see the kind of each query for your own prompts?

Record the turn while ChatGPT answers. Since 14 September 2026, ChatGPT sends query text only in the live stream and leaves it out of the saved chat, as our post on why ChatGPT's fan-out queries went missing explains.

1. Add Only Fan Out to Chrome, open chatgpt.com and click its toolbar icon to open the side panel.
2. Send your prompt as normal. The panel lists ChatGPT's web, business, image and find queries in the order it ran them.
3. Read the pages fetched and cited beside them. On a shopping prompt, product cards show apart from the cited sources.
4. Export the turn as CSV, Markdown or JSON, and count queries by kind in a spreadsheet.

Before you compare turns, split business lines that bundle queries with semicolons, keep the place name with each part, and drop the find lines. Our GEO playbook for fan-out data sets out the rest of the cleaning rules and what to do with the list.

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