How engines work
Query fan-out
Query fan-out is when an answer engine turns one question into several searches of its own before answering. Asking about the best option in a category may quietly become separate searches for price, reviews, warranty and alternatives.
In more detail
Fan-out is why a brand can be absent from an answer despite ranking well for the original question: the engine went looking for something adjacent and found somebody else there.
It also means covering the sub-questions around a topic matters as much as covering the headline one.
How Allswap measures this
Guides that cover this
Related terms
Prompt
A prompt is the question or instruction someone gives an AI assistant. In AEO, prompts take the place of keywords: they are whole questions, usually carrying context, and that context shapes which brands get named.
Topic coverage
Topic coverage is how visible a brand is inside each subject its category is made of — pricing, integrations, security, support. It turns a scattered list of prompt results into a short list of subjects worth working on.
Retrieval-augmented generation
Retrieval-augmented generation is when a model searches for relevant documents and writes its answer from what it finds, rather than from training alone. It is why a page published this week can appear in an answer today.
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