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

gist

Trellner Research asked Perplexity Sonar and Sonar-Pro for the best products in 380 software categories and kept every retrieved URL. Of 7,534 citations, 59.8 percent land outside the Tranco top 100,000 and 23.4 percent outside the top million. A demo-vendor blog that competes in none of those markets is the third-largest source, ahead of Gartner. Three post-2023 brands sharing one template have published 215,128 generated best-software pages addressed to retrieval models. The measurement covers Perplexity only and does not test whether removing those sources would change the recommendations.

ideas

• Most of the evidence is long-tail. 59.8% of 7,534 Perplexity citations sit outside Tranco's top 100,000, and 23.4% are not in the top million at all.
• A marketing blog can outrank Gartner. Guideflow sells product demos, competes in none of the 380 categories, and still supplied 194 citations across 96 of them.
• Three brands manufacture grounding pages. wifitalents.com, worldmetrics.org, and gitnux.org share DNS, template, and cross-promotion, and have published 215,128 generated best-software buying guides since late 2023.
• The pages address models, not buyers. Two homepages title themselves Facts & Grounding Page and advertise a machine-readable record; the same category yields three conflicting top-five lists and leftover template variables.
• The measurement is Perplexity's retrieval mix. Sonar and Sonar-Pro share a citation layer; the report does not claim other engines match, or that swapping these sources would change the products named.

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