Boost your skills with Growth Memo’s weekly expert insights. Subscribe for free ! For years, SEOs have operated on a simple assumption: The more ground your content covers, the more likely it is to surface in AI-generated answers . In fact, every “best practice” in classic SEO content pushes you toward more: more subtopics, more sections, more words. Build the “ultimate guide.” An analysis of 815,000 query-page pairs across 16,851 queries and 353,799 pages says otherwise: Fan-out coverage is nearly irrelevant to citation rates. Two signals actually predict whether ChatGPT cites your page. Six concrete changes to your existing content library help. 1. The Study AirOps ran 16,851 queries through ChatGPT three times each through the UI, capturing every fan-out sub-query, every URL searched, every citation made, and every page scraped. Oshen Davidson built the pipeline. I analyzed the data. Each query generates an average of two fan-out queries .…