{"slug": "openai-site-fanouts", "title": "OpenAI site: Fanouts", "summary": "Promptwatch reported on 10 August 2026 that the share of ChatGPT fanout queries containing the 'site:' operator rose from 0.37% to 16.8% on 8 August, but an independent capture of 196,692 OpenAI fanout queries by the source shows no such spike, with 0 of 371 fanouts on 8 August containing 'site:' and an August rate of 0.14%. The source's data, spanning 1 March to 25 August 2026, shows the 'site:' rate fell from 6.43% in March to 0.14% in August, correlating with model version rather than date, as gpt-5.5 scopes only 0.15% of fanouts to a domain versus 5.88% for gpt-5.2 and 5.32% for gpt-5.4.", "body_md": "Promptwatch recorded ChatGPT site:-scoped fanouts rising from 0.37% to 16.8% on 8 August 2026. Our capture of 196,692 OpenAI fanout queries shows 0.14% in August and no change on that date.\n\nPromptwatch reported on 10 August 2026 that the share of ChatGPT fanout queries containing the `site:`\n\noperator rose from 0.37% to 16.8% on 8 August, and that average fanouts per response moved from 1.08 to 1.83. Our own capture of OpenAI fanout queries over the same window records a different pattern. On 8 August, 0 of 371 fanouts contained `site:`\n\n. The August figure is 20 of 14,460, or 0.14%, and the highest single day in August is 0.86%. Average fanouts per searching response in August is 1.10, against 1.01 on 8 August. Across our full window the `site:`\n\nrate falls rather than rises, from 6.43% in March to 0.14% in August, and it moves with the model version in use rather than with the calendar.\n\n551,668 fanout queries captured between 1 March and 25 August 2026 across providers. The OpenAI subset is 196,692 fanout queries from three GPT-5 versions, called through the OpenAI Responses API with web search enabled and driven by a fixed set of monitoring prompts that run daily. A fanout query is the search string the model issues while composing an answer, stored as the API returns it. A query counts as `site:`\n\n-scoped if the string contains `site:`\n\nat any position.\n\n| Month | Fanouts | site: fanouts | Share |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| 2026-03 | 79,647 | 5,118 | 6.43% |\n| 2026-04 | 18,904 | 560 | 2.96% |\n| 2026-05 | 35,679 | 1,293 | 3.62% |\n| 2026-06 | 31,839 | 79 | 0.25% |\n| 2026-07 | 16,163 | 8 | 0.05% |\n| 2026-08 | 14,460 | 20 | 0.14% |\n\nThe reported step change falls on 8 August. Our daily series covers 1 to 25 August.\n\n| Date | Fanouts | site: fanouts | Share | Avg fanouts per searching response |\n|---|---|---|---|---|\n| 2026-08-01 | 363 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.01 |\n| 2026-08-02 | 362 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.01 |\n| 2026-08-03 | 479 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.02 |\n| 2026-08-04 | 472 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.02 |\n| 2026-08-05 | 699 | 2 | 0.29% | 1.07 |\n| 2026-08-06 | 772 | 1 | 0.13% | 1.10 |\n| 2026-08-07 | 824 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.15 |\n| 2026-08-08 | 371 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.01 |\n| 2026-08-09 | 502 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.03 |\n| 2026-08-10 | 505 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.01 |\n| 2026-08-11 | 408 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.01 |\n| 2026-08-12 | 739 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.09 |\n| 2026-08-13 | 634 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.13 |\n| 2026-08-14 | 575 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.13 |\n| 2026-08-15 | 339 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.00 |\n| 2026-08-16 | 596 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.30 |\n| 2026-08-17 | 755 | 1 | 0.13% | 1.31 |\n| 2026-08-18 | 393 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.00 |\n| 2026-08-19 | 697 | 6 | 0.86% | 1.15 |\n| 2026-08-20 | 1,293 | 4 | 0.31% | 1.14 |\n| 2026-08-21 | 960 | 6 | 0.63% | 1.30 |\n| 2026-08-22 | 345 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.02 |\n| 2026-08-23 | 342 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.01 |\n| 2026-08-24 | 817 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.03 |\n| 2026-08-25 | 218 | 0 | 0.00% | 1.32 |\n\nCounting only responses that ran at least one search, the average number of fanouts per response has fallen through the window.\n\n| Month | Responses with a search | Avg fanouts |\n|---|---|---|\n| 2026-03 | 12,931 | 6.16 |\n| 2026-04 | 8,022 | 2.36 |\n| 2026-05 | 22,833 | 1.56 |\n| 2026-06 | 26,349 | 1.21 |\n| 2026-07 | 14,848 | 1.09 |\n| 2026-08 | 13,096 | 1.10 |\n\nSplitting the OpenAI subset by model version places the change at the version boundary rather than at any date in August.\n\n| Model | Active in our runs | Fanouts | site: fanouts | Share |\n|---|---|---|---|---|\n| gpt-5.2 | 1 Mar to 22 Apr | 86,988 | 5,116 | 5.88% |\n| gpt-5.4 | 28 Mar to 8 Jun | 34,689 | 1,846 | 5.32% |\n| gpt-5.5 | 20 May to 25 Aug | 75,015 | 116 | 0.15% |\n\ngpt-5.2 and gpt-5.4 scope roughly one fanout in eighteen to a domain. gpt-5.5, which carries all of our August traffic, scopes one in 647.\n\nAcross all 7,078 `site:`\n\nfanouts in the OpenAI subset, 6,938 strings are unique, so the same scoped query almost never repeats. The mean number of domains named in one query is 1.13, with 274 queries (3.9%) naming two or more and a maximum of 10 chained with OR. The median `site:`\n\nquery is the 9th fanout of a response that issues 17.6 fanouts in total, and 6.8% of them are the first query the model runs. The scoped searches therefore sit in the middle of a longer sequence, after other searches have already returned.\n\nPromptwatch samples the ChatGPT consumer interface. We sample the OpenAI API with web search. The prompt sets also differ: ours is a fixed monitoring panel of brand and category prompts repeated daily, theirs is drawn from platform interfaces. Surface, prompt wording, and prompt mix are all candidate causes of the gap, and our data does not separate them.\n\nThe prompt set is the part that can be tested directly. Running our own prompt panel through the ChatGPT interface on the same day as the API run would hold the prompts constant and leave the surface as the only variable. We have not run that test.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-site-fanouts", "canonical_source": "https://dejan.ai/blog/site-fanouts/", "published_at": "2026-08-25 08:39:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-25 08:43:58.832396+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-research"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "ChatGPT", "Promptwatch", "gpt-5.2", "gpt-5.4", "gpt-5.5", "OpenAI Responses API"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-site-fanouts", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-site-fanouts.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-site-fanouts.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-site-fanouts.jsonld"}}