Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
- ID
- 20907
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 02 Sep 2026, 9:59 PM
- Fetched
- 04 Sep 2026, 10:46 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://trellner.com/reports/manufactured-sources-behind-ai-recommendations/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 8.5
- Created
- 04 Sep 2026, 11:51 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Trellner Research tested Perplexity's sonar and sonar-pro models across 380 software categories and found 59.8% of 7,534 citations point to domains ranked worse than #100,000 in Tranco, with 23.4% outside the top 1M entirely. Three sites under apparent common control published 215,128 machine-generated 'best <category>' pages between them, two with the HTML title 'Facts & Grounding Page' — explicitly built to be read by retrieval models, not humans. None of the three domains existed before December 2023.
Why it matters
If you build AI agents that ground answers in web search, your retrieval pipeline is likely citing SEO-for-AI farms that didn't exist two years ago. SaaS founders should not assume AI search engines surface their product accurately — the citation graph is being gamed by mass-generated pages designed to intercept model retrieval. Anyone using Perplexity for software recommendations should treat its grounding sources with the same skepticism as classic SEO spam.
Discussion angle
How do you validate grounding sources in your own agent pipelines — do you filter by domain reputation, and would a Tranco-rank cutoff have caught these 215k manufactured pages, or would it also exclude legitimate niche software sites?