Three sites made 215,128 "best software" pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

Trellner Research tested Perplexity's sonar and sonar-pro across 380 software categories. 59.8% of citations came from domains ranked worse than #100,000, and 23.4% from domains not in the top million at all. Three sites—wifitalents.com, worldmetrics.org, and gitnux.org—published 215,128 machine-generated "best software" pages between them, all registered after December 2023. Two of them set their homepage HTML title to "Facts & Grounding Page" with a meta description calling it a "machine-readable record"—clearly written for retrieval models, not people. Separately, guideflow.com, a vendor's marketing blog, became the third most-cited source, ahead of Gartner. The test only covered Perplexity, not Google, so the finding is specific to one engine, but it shows how easily retrieval layers treat bulk-generated SEO content as trustworthy evidence.

Why it matters: Trellner Research tested two Perplexity models across 380 software categories and found nearly 60% of citations come from low-authority domains, with three machine-generated sites producing 215K pages and getting cited heavily. Solid methodology, transparent data, and it hits ...