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

A study examined 7,534 citations from web-grounded models for "best software" in 380 categories. It found that 59.8% of cited domains ranked worse than #100,000 on Tranco, and 23.4% were not in the top million. Three sites, created after December 2023 and potentially under common control, generated 215,128 machine-generated "best pages" and were frequently cited. These findings suggest a reliance on low-ranking or newly created domains for AI model grounding.