Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
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Three AI-generated sites produced 215,128 "best software" pages that Perplexity frequently cites.
A study of 380 software categories using Perplexity's sonar models found that 59.8% of 7,534 citations pointed to domains ranked below #100,000 on Tranco, and 23.4% pointed to domains not in the top million at all. Three domains (wifitalents.com, worldmetrics.org, gitnux.org) created 215,128 machine-generated buying guides between them, none existing before December 2023. Guideflow.com, a vendor's marketing blog, was the third most-cited source. The sites' homepages bear the title "Facts & Grounding Page" and identical meta descriptions aimed at retrieval systems. Their category pages give different top recommendations for the same query.
What commenters are saying
Several commenters noted the irony of an AI-written article criticizing AI-generated slop. One called the piece "clearly a Claude artifact" with tedious prose. Multiple users flagged that the submitter's account posts similar AI-generated "research" reports. Another camp discussed the broader problem: searching for products has become impossible, and manipulating training data to get recommendations is a growing industry. One user said they've stopped using the Internet for learning and returned to library books published before 2020s. Several proposed terms for this practice, including Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).