3 Sites Created 215K AI-Bait Pages — Perplexity Cites Them
Original: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
Why This Matters
AI-grounded recommendations are increasingly shaped by low-traffic, machine-generated content farms built to exploit retrieval pipelines.
Trellner Research tested Perplexity's sonar and sonar-pro across 380 software categories, generating 7,534 citations. Results show 59.8% of cited domains rank outside the top 100,000 websites, and three newly created sites with 215,128 machine-generated pages are among the most-cited sources.
On September 2, 2026, Trellner Research submitted 380 software buyer-intent categories to Perplexity's sonar and sonar-pro models via OpenRouter, collecting every cited URL. The 7,534 citations spanned 2,055 distinct domains. Of those, 59.8% ranked below #100,000 in the Tranco top-1M list, and 23.4% did not appear in the top million at all. The median Tranco rank of cited domains was 71,611.
Three domains — none existing before December 2023 — had collectively published 215,128 machine-generated "best [category]" pages. Two of them titled their homepages "Facts & Grounding Page," explicitly targeting AI retrieval systems. These sites showed no meaningful human readership.
Notably, guideflow.com — a vendor selling interactive product demos, not a review or directory site — was cited 194 times across 96 of the 380 categories, ranking third overall, ahead of Gartner (158 citations). wifitalents.com and worldmetrics.org, both with Tranco ranks above 100,000, also appeared in the top ten. Wikipedia received only 3 citations total. The researchers note these findings apply specifically to Perplexity and should not be generalized to other AI search engines.