Search subqueries (QFO)

What this is

When someone asks an AI about your niche, it almost never searches with their wording. It writes several queries of its own, searches with each one and builds the answer from the pages it finds.

Query Fan-Out, or QFO, shows those phrasings with no translation and no processing. They reveal what the AI considers relevant and which topics it needs pages on to find and name your brand.

Where to find it

Subqueries live in two places, both inside Queries.

In the query row

A query with collected answers gets a subqueries icon. It opens the Search subqueries block, grouped by AI and survey date, newest first.

In the QFO tab

The QFO tab collects subqueries across all your queries. One row is one full phrasing within a company. Sorting, search and filters work over the whole selection.

What the columns show

Each phrasing shows how stable it is and where it came from.

• Appearances. How many times the phrasing occurred in search metadata. Repeats inside one answer only raise this counter.
• AI answers. How many distinct answers contained it. A fairer measure of reach than appearances.
• AI count. How many different AIs searched with these words. The more, the more stable the topic.
• Source query. Which of your queries it grew from, with company, product, language and region.
• Search type and answer date. Web or image search, and when the answer containing the phrasing was saved.

Adding a subquery to your queries

Any phrasing can be taken into tracking with the Add to my queries button. It joins your list with the company, product, region and language of the source query.

That is the main value here: you track the wording an AI actually used, not your guess about it.

Good to know

• Opening the tab runs no surveys and charges nothing: it reads answers you already collected.
• Subqueries come from Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Alice and ChatGPT. Other sources leave no such traces, which does not mean they did not search.
• Phrasings merge only on an exact text match. Punctuation, numbers and case are kept as is.