Fan-out coverage studyFull data

Full dataset

Coverage and citation rate

The primary table from AirOps, “The Fan-Out Effect” (primary sim ≥ 0.8). Three bands only. AirOps did not publish finer bands. We report them exactly as published.

Coverage	Meaning	Pages	Citation rate
0%	none of the sub-questions	79,024	35.5%
26–50%	moderate coverage	28,785	38.2%
100%	all of the sub-questions	120,572	34.0%

Citation rate = share of pages in that band that ChatGPT cited. The 26 to 50% band beats the 100% band by 4.2 percentage points.

Corpus totals

The full AirOps dataset. One model, scraped from the ChatGPT interface. Each query ran three times.

Metric	Value
Unique queries	16,851
ChatGPT responses (queries × 3 runs)	50,553
Pages scraped	353,799
Coverage scoring rows (query × page × run)	815,484
Fan-out detail rows	1,511,251
Models tested	1 (ChatGPT, UI-scraped)
Queries with no coverage data (excluded)	806
Low-content pages excluded (word count < 100)	35,020
Primary cosine similarity threshold	0.80

Fan-out behavior

Most queries fan out small. The “cover every sub-question” target is usually two questions, not dozens.

Fan-out pattern	Share of queries
Exactly 2 sub-queries	88.6%
Zero sub-queries	8.8%
4 or more sub-queries	2.5%

Signals that move citation more than coverage

Coverage moves citation by 4.2 percentage points across its full range. Retrieval position moves it by 44. Query-heading match moves it by 12. Coverage is the weakest of the three.

Signal	Citation rate
Retrieval position 1	58%
Retrieval position 10	14%
Strong query-heading match	41%
Weak query-heading match	29%
Coverage 26–50% (best band)	38.2%
Coverage 100%	34.0%

AirOps' own verdict: “Fan-out coverage adds only +4.6pp uncontrolled, and the signal disappears when query match is held constant.”

Provenance

Every number above traces to the AirOps report. We fetched the source HTML directly. The four core statistics were re-checked by GLM 5.2 and Grok 4.5 from separate providers. See the methodology page for the full verification method.

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