This Tool Shows You Exactly What

When your customers ask ChatGPT or Gemini something, the model quietly fires a set of traditional web searches in the background, retrieves the ranking pages, and synthesizes the answer from those. The sites that rank for those hidden queries get cited. The ones that don’t, don’t. QueryFan generates persona-specific prompts, runs them through both models, and captures the exact searches each one triggered. That list is your real AI visibility target. It’s free.

Keywords Lists Are Useful, They Just Miss Half The Picture

Let me be precise about that before anyone writes a furious reply.

I’m using the term “keywords” to refer to the “one-shot” queries that go into traditional search engines. Yes, I know we’ve been in a “semantic” world for over a decade, but let’s just agree on terminology that everyone can follow for now.

The primary issue of “keyword lists” in context to AI search is threefold:

1. Typically, queries (prompts) that go into LLMs tend to be longer, multifaceted, and conversational in nature. Traditional searches tend to be more narrow in scope.
2. Traditional search is “one-shot.” You do your search, get your information, then do another independent search. Queries/prompts on LLMs tend to be conversational in nature and carry the context of previous tokens.
3. The mechanisms that LLMs use for web search also carry personalization context. If the user has previously stated they are a vegan, and they ask the LLM about [running shoes], it is highly likely the LLM will perform a search to accommodate this.

In essence, AI search has become a kind of “universal intent decoder” for users. Those big, multifacted conversations with the AI get broken down into subsets of solvable queries, which are run in the background as “traditional” searches on Google or Bing, with the resulting sites used to generate a response. The process is known as “Retrieval Augmented Generation” (RAG).

The optimization target has moved. You are no longer optimizing purely for what the human types into a chat box. You are optimizing for what the AI agent quietly searches for on their behalf, in the background, without the user knowing it happened.

Those background queries are what QueryFan captures. They are often quite different from what the user actually asked. And they are the exact list of things you need to rank for to appear in AI-generated answers.

Exhibit A: Reddit Fell Off A Cliff On A Tuesday

The scope and depth of this secret relationship became clear when Reddit was enjoying meteoric visibility increases in Google, and tragedy struck on September 10th, 2026. According to citation tracking data from PromptWatch, Reddit’s citation rate in ChatGPT responses collapsed almost overnight. It had been running as high as 15% of all citations. Within days, it was sitting below 2%.

The cause was…