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

Perplexity's AI models cited 7,534 URLs when recommending software across 380 categories, with nearly 60% pointing to obscure domains ranked below #100,000 and 23% to sites outside the top million entirely. Three apparently related websites created 215,128 machine-generated "best software" pages and all emerged after December 2023, suggesting the models are being grounded on newly created, low-authority content rather than established sources. The median rank of cited domains is 71,611, and over a third of cited domains don't appear in the top million at all, indicating Perplexity's recommendations are heavily influenced by obscure and recently-created web pages.