sdaEver since Google launched AI Mode, I’ve had two questions on my mind:
- How do we ensure our content gets shown in AI results?
- How do we figure out what works when AI search is still largely a mystery?
While there’s a lot of advice online, much of it is speculative at best. Everyone has hypotheses about AI optimization, but few are running actual experiments to see what works.
One idea is optimizing for query fan-out. Query fan-out is a process where AI systems (particularly Google AI Mode and ChatGPT search) take your original search query and break it down into multiple sub-queries, then gather information from various sources to build a comprehensive response.
This illustration perfectly depicts the query fan-out process.