TL;DR: ChatGPT's search and retrieval mechanism are more complicated than just "I searched and got these results". The upshot is there are several technical and content optimizations you can make to make it easier for ChatGPT to find and cite your pages.
The short answer
When ChatGPT searches the web to answer a question, it does 3 main things before generating an answer:
- ChatGPT turns one question into several hidden searches.
- It reads a simplified, text-only copy of each page it finds, cut into small pieces.
- Only a few of those pieces make it into the final answer.
A researcher at Peec AI recently shared what looks like a raw view of this process, captured from ChatGPT's own response stream. This article evaluates these findings and what they could mean for your site.
One question is really many searches
When you ask ChatGPT for the "best AI visibility tools," it does not send those words to a search engine and read the top results. It rewrites your question into narrower searches, such as:
- "best AI visibility tools for agencies"
- "best AI visibility tools by price"
- "best AI visibility tools with reporting"
and so on, and it then runs them all side by side.
These hidden searches are called query fan-outs. OpenAI's own documentation says ChatGPT typically rewrites a query into one or more targeted queries.
How many it runs varies a lot:
- Not every question triggers it. In a DataForSEO study of 100,000 prompts, about 47.5% triggered a fan-out.
- Typical counts are small. Peec reports about 2.1 fan-outs per ChatGPT prompt, and the tracker LLM Pulse reports about 1.0.
- The new capture shows a much bigger case. For one "best tools" prompt, the researcher reports 5 search rounds, 18 different queries, 50 calls to search engines, 228 results, 223 pages fetched, and 16 links cited.
Treat that last example as a ceiling for a broad comparison question, not as the average. It was one prompt, and nobody has repeated it yet.
The lesson holds either way. You are not competing for one keyword. You are competing across the whole family of questions behind a topic, and the reader only sees the 16 winners out of 228 candidates.
What ChatGPT does with your page
The model does not read your page the way a visitor does. According to the new capture, it works from highlights:
- Simplify. Your page is converted from HTML into plain, markdown-style text: headings, bullets, and tables flattened into simple characters. Design, images, and scripts drop away.
- Slice. That text is cut into blocks of roughly 170 words.
- Score. Every block is scored against the question, and the scores are kept.
- Select. The model receives only one to three blocks per source, along with a word budget for how much it may use from each.
Think of a reader who tears two or three paragraphs out of every book on the shelf and writes the answer from those pages alone. Kind of silly sounding, but this is akin to what ChatGPT is doing.
So remember, you could write an amazing article that reads and flows amazingly well overall, but if it doesn't have tight, well-structured and reasonably standalone sections that GPT can pull from, it likely won't get cited. Write and structure your pages accordingly.
Why your title and description matter
Another interesting finding is that each search result carries your page's raw meta tags with it, such as the title and meta description. A separate field meant for social-preview (Open Graph) data was empty on every result they saw.
If that holds up, two things follow:
- Your title and meta description likely shape how ChatGPT first sizes up your page, before it reads any body text. Say plainly what question the page answers.
- Don't count on social-preview tags to do that job. Make the standard title and description work on their own.
What to do about it
- Let the search crawler in. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain links. It is a separate bot from GPTBot, which covers training, so blocking one does not block the other. Check your robots.txt and your server logs and make sure at least one but preferably both are allowed.
- Make every section stand on its own. If the model sees only one to three blocks of about 170 words, each section should lead with its answer and make sense without the rest of the page. Don't overdo it though, rewriting every paragraph as a self-contained answer can easily produce robotic text that no one wants to read and comes off as obviously AI-generated.
- Cover the neighboring questions. Fan-outs ask about price, comparisons, and who a product is for. Peec reports they often add words like "best," "top," and "reviews," and that their length roughly doubled, from about 6 to about 12 words. From Peak Answer's own studies, we've also found that specifically targeting these "smaller" neighboring questions can also be a good, lower barrier entry point into AI answers in general too.
- Keep key facts in plain text. Headings, lists, and tables all get read because crawlers can convert them to text. Images, tabs, or scripts may not. So ideally you want to
- Write a title and meta description that name the question the page answers.
How Peak Answer helps
You can't see ChatGPT's hidden searches yourself, but you can see their effect: which questions mention your brand, and which sources get cited instead of you. Overall, this is more important than understanding and acting on the inner workings for a few reasons:
- Overall what's more important are the actual results rather than the process - who is showing up in citations and getting mentioned in answers and who not. If you can't measure a noticeable difference here then it's basically just an academic exercise.
- The inner workings (i.e. the search and retrieval mechanisms) change very often - you can optimize for the current state but then it changes
Peak Answer helps you go deep with tracking and measurement to make sure you track the questions that matter to your business. It also shows you specifically which sources AI answers cite, gives you the raw questions and answers and allows you to hand-customize the tracked questions for ultimate control. This is unique among AI search visibility tools and is great for really going deep on AI search visibility and understanding how things are changing over time as you execute your Peak Answer-curated action plan.
If you'd rather a simpler approach and just have it run on auto-pilot instead, though, that's an option too.
Sources
FAQs
In short, 5 things:
- Let the search crawler in
- Make each section stand on its own
- Answer the neighboring questions
- Keep key facts in plain text like headings, lists, and tables. Not images, tabs, or scripts
- Write a clear title and meta description that states the question and answers it
When you ask ChatGPT a question, behind the scenes it rewrites it or "fans it out" into several narrower mini searches and runs them side by side. Most prompts trigger only a few, but broad comparison questions can trigger dozens.
No. When it retrieves your page usually it will create a simplified text copy first, then it cuts it into smaller blocks or chunks, and passes only the best 1-3 per source to the model. That's why it's best to make sure each section within your pages gives full context and can stand on its own (while still maintaining overall flow and readability if possible).