Three sites made 215,128 "best software" pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
An investigation reveals that AI models like Perplexity often ground their recommendations in low-quality, machine-generated websites. These sites were created specifically to manipulate search results and lack human-verified content.
Why it matters
This highlights a significant risk of 'model collapse' and misinformation in AI-driven search, where AI systems inadvertently prioritize SEO-spam over reliable human expertise.
Across 380 software categories, 59.8% of the sources behind grounded AI recommendations sit outside the 100,000 most-visited websites, and several of the most-cited are sites built to be read by models rather than by people.
We asked two web-grounded models for the best products in 380 software categories and kept every URL they retrieved. Of the 7,534 citations that came back, 59.8% point at domains ranked worse than #100,000 in the Tranco top-1M list and 23.4% at domains that are not in the top million at all. Two of the sites doing the grounding have given their homepage the HTML title "Facts & Grounding Page" — grounding being the retrieval step these models perform — and they and a third site under apparently common control have published 215,128 machine-generated best <category> pages between them; none of the three domains existed before December 2023.
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