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Want to see how ChatGPT thinks? There’s a hack for that....

This little-known workflow reveals the logic, links, and sources behind any ChatGPT reply.

Author

Andy Francos
June 22, 2025

Weekly roundup collage featuring AI, Meta, Apple, WhatsApp, OpenAI, and TikTok

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Welcome

Hello and welcome to all new subscribers. 👋

This is your weekly does of business, marketing and tech updates. Lets get into it!

WhatsApp is finally getting native advertising. Starting with a global roll-out announced this week, brands will be able to slot short video or image “Status Ads” into the Updates tab—right between friends’ Stories and promoted Channels.

Tapping one of these spots can jump straight into a chat thread, letting users ask questions or complete a purchase without ever leaving WhatsApp.

Reports this week indicate that Apple is weighing a bid for Perplexity AI, the fast-growing conversational-search start-up. For the Cupertino based giant, whose last headline-grabbing purchase was Beats for $3 billion in 2014, such a deal would mark a rare, large-scale break from its usual strategy of small, tuck-in acquisitions and heavy in-house R&D.

The move underlines how urgently Apple wants to close its generative-AI gap. It would also echo Meta’s recent manoeuvres as Bloomberg reports that Mark Zuckerberg also explored buying Perplexity earlier this year before Meta opted instead for a roughly $14.8 billion deal to take a 49 % stake in data-labelling specialist Scale AI on 10 June 2025.

Here’s a quick dive into the stories that shaped business, tech and marketing this week 👇

📖 What I have been reading this week in business, marketing & tech

👆 Tap-worthy reads from this week.

ChatGPT query fan-out

How ChatGPT builds its sub-prompts

One of LinkedIn’s hottest talking points this week is a clever ChatGPT-in-DevTools trick. I first spotted it in Mark Williams-Cook’s feed: open Chrome DevTools, filter the Network tab to fetch/XHR, select the request named conversation, and you’ll see the exact Bing search queries, source URLs—and even snippets of ChatGPT’s own reasoning—behind any answer. In short, it’s a live peek at the sub-topics ChatGPT thinks matter. Let’s dive in!

Firstly, open ChatGPT and open Chrome DevTools:

Now ask ChatGPT something, say, “What IPOs are coming up in July?” — and keep Chrome DevTools open. You’ll spot a request called conversation under the Name tab.

Click the file and you’ll see the full JSON. Just copy and paste it into your favourite LLM to dig into how ChatGPT used Bing to pull the data behind its reply.

The file’s a bit too long to drop in as-is—so upload it, then run a follow-up prompt to get a clearer visual of what’s going on.

Once it’s processed, you’ll get a clean table of sub-prompts used to generate the answer. Want to go deeper? You can also see exactly which sources were used—perfect for PR and content teams.

If all of that seems like too much work, you can always use this smart plugin created by Ziggy Shtrosberg that runs as a bookmark on your browser!

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Thank you

Thanks for reading this week’s edition.

More Franc Talking episodes are on the way, including upcoming conversations with content marketer Louise Linehan from Ahrefs, and Nelson Disanto, a former client who led Oral Care marketing across Europe at P&G.

Make sure to keep a look out for when these drop!

Andy