Query fan-out: the sub-questions behind one question
AI answers break your question into sub-questions, and the one you win decides which answer cites you.
What it is
An AI assistant rarely answers a question directly. It decomposes the question into related sub-questions, answers each, and combines the results. That means a page can be excellent on the headline question and absent from the answer, because the sub-question the engine leaned on was one you never covered.
When to use it
When you are deciding what to write next, and when a prompt you expect to win keeps citing somebody else.
Step by step
- 1Open the free query fan-out explorer and enter a phrase a buyer would type.
- 2Read down the seven families of sub-question it expands into.
- 3For each family, ask honestly whether you have a page that answers it well.
- 4Add the questions you cannot answer to your tracked prompt set, then measure which of them cite you.
What you will see
Fourteen sub-questions grouped into seven buyer intents, each with the reason an engine would ask it.
Measured, never manufactured
The expansion is MODELLED, not measured, and the tool says so above its own output. No engine publishes the sub-queries it generates, so anyone showing you “the queries ChatGPT ran” is showing you a guess. What we measure is the other half: which of those questions actually cite you, with the sample size beside it.
Check it yourself, free
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AI Prompts: the questions we testCurate the buyer questions we ask AI engines when measuring your Answer Share.