B Evidence Grade B Graded accuracy verified by the review judge Safe to Cite Current

32.9%

32.9% -- share of ai citations from fan out sub queries for AI search platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO) (2026)

Name: Share Of AI Citations From Fan Out Sub Queries Statistics
Creator: Lighthouse Intelligence
Published: 2026-10-04

2026 · n=548,534 · AirOps

32.9% of AI-cited pages were discoverable only through fan-out sub-queries rather than the primary user prompt.

Observational data from AirOps

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Attribution: AirOps View source

Lighthouse Research Team

Last verified: 2026-10-04 · How we verify data →

Source verified Evidence graded

Value

32.9%

Unit

Percentage

Data Vintage

2026

Entity

AI search platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO)

Sample Size

548,534

Evidence Quality

Strong, reliable evidence

Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.

61/100 confidence

Single source - not yet corroborated

Score breakdown

Extraction

Source Trust

Citation Chain

Independence

Methodology

Freshness

Source

AirOps Primary Tier B

https://betteraisearch.com/tactics/fan-out-queries-geo ↗

Confidence: 53/100 Vintage: 2026 Channel: Common Crawl

Source Article

Fan-Out Query Coverage for AI Search

Original Research

AirOps · Original study ↗

Methodology

AirOps observational analysis of 548,534 pages across 15,000 prompts

Methodology documented

Segmentation

Industrymarketing

Cite this stat

Plain Text

AI search platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO): 32.9% share of ai citations from fan out sub queries. Source: AirOps (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/fan-out-queries-ai-citations-share

HTML Embed

<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/fan-out-queries-ai-citations-share" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>32.9%</strong> -- share of ai citations from fan out sub queries for AI search platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AIO)<br><small>Source: AirOps (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/fan-out-queries-ai-citations-share" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>

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