Fan-out queries
The hidden sub-questions a generative engine generates from one user prompt, each retrieving its own sources before the answer is written.
A single question rarely produces a single retrieval. The engine expands it into related sub-queries, gathers candidate sources for each, then synthesises one answer from what survived. A buyer asking which analytics tool to choose can trigger sub-queries about pricing, GDPR compliance, WordPress support and migration difficulty without ever typing those words.
This is why optimising for one head term underperforms. The page that wins is the one answering the whole fan-out in a single document, which is also why comparison pages, FAQs and structured tables outperform narrative posts in generated answers: they cover many sub-questions in a form a model can lift cleanly.