Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
三个网站为 AI 生成了 215,128 个“最佳软件”页面，Perplexity 正在引用它们
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
What we ran
我们的测试方法
On 2 September 2026 we put 380 buyer-intent categories — from “CRM software” to “museum collection management software” — to perplexity/sonar and perplexity/sonar-pro through OpenRouter, one prompt per category per model, 760 calls in all. Each call asked for a ranked top five as JSON, with each product’s official homepage domain. All 760 returned a parseable answer, and both models report the URLs they retrieved, which is why they were chosen. The categories were written before any results were seen and never revised. That produced 3,800 recommendation slots naming 1,807 distinct products, and 7,534 citations spanning 2,055 distinct domains. We then looked up every cited domain in the Tranco daily list for 2026-09-01 and in the Wayback Machine, and fetched every one of the 1,502 vendor homepages the models supplied to see whether it still exists. 2026 年 9 月 2 日，我们通过 OpenRouter 向 perplexity/sonar 和 perplexity/sonar-pro 输入了 380 个具有购买意向的类别（从“CRM 软件”到“博物馆藏品管理软件”），每个模型针对每个类别进行一次提示，总计 760 次调用。每次调用都要求以 JSON 格式返回排名前五的产品及其官方主页域名。所有 760 次调用都返回了可解析的答案，且两个模型都报告了它们检索到的 URL，这也是我们选择它们的原因。这些类别在查看任何结果之前就已确定，且从未修改。这产生了 3,800 个推荐位，涉及 1,807 个不同的产品，以及跨越 2,055 个不同域名的 7,534 条引用。随后，我们在 2026 年 9 月 1 日的 Tranco 日榜和 Wayback Machine 中查询了每一个被引用的域名，并抓取了模型提供的 1,502 个供应商主页，以查看它们是否仍然存在。
Google was left out. Grounding a Gemini model on OpenRouter means routing it through OpenRouter’s own web-search plugin, so the citations would describe that plugin rather than Google’s retrieval. Only Perplexity was measured, and nothing here should be read as a claim about any other engine. Google 未被纳入测试。在 OpenRouter 上对 Gemini 模型进行“基础信息”检索意味着通过 OpenRouter 自己的网络搜索插件进行路由，因此引用内容描述的是该插件而非 Google 的检索结果。本次仅测量了 Perplexity，文中的任何内容均不应被解读为针对其他搜索引擎的结论。
Where the citations land
引用分布情况
The median Tranco rank of the 5,768 citations that point at a ranked domain is 71,611. Concentration at the top is unremarkable — the ten most-cited domains take 17.3% of citations — so the story is not that a cartel of famous sites supplies the answers. It is what fills the other four-fifths: 751 of the 2,055 cited domains, 36.5% of them, do not appear in the top million. Those domains are also newer. The median first Wayback capture is 2020 for the unranked cited domains against 2011 for the ranked ones, and 16.6% of the archived unranked domains were first captured in 2025 or later, against 1.6% of the archived ranked ones. 在 5,768 条指向已排名域名的引用中，Tranco 中位排名为 71,611。头部集中度并不显著——引用次数最多的十个域名占据了 17.3% 的引用量——因此，问题的关键不在于知名网站垄断了答案，而在于填补其余五分之四的内容：在 2,055 个被引用的域名中，有 751 个（占比 36.5%）甚至未进入百万强榜单。这些域名也更为年轻。未排名域名的 Wayback Machine 首次抓取时间中位数为 2020 年，而已排名域名为 2011 年；在已归档的未排名域名中，16.6% 是在 2025 年或之后首次被抓取的，而已排名域名中这一比例仅为 1.6%。
The ten most-cited domains:
引用次数最多的十个域名：
| Domain | Citations | Share | Tranco rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| g2.com | 291 | 3.86% | 4,027 |
| reddit.com | 261 | 3.46% | 105 |
| guideflow.com | 194 | 2.57% | 177,039 |
| gartner.com | 158 | 2.10% | 1,766 |
| zapier.com | 82 | 1.09% | 2,919 |
| wifitalents.com | 71 | 0.94% | 105,281 |
| capterra.com | 68 | 0.90% | 6,387 |
| linkedin.com | 67 | 0.89% | 18 |
| worldmetrics.org | 60 | 0.80% | 104,737 |
| gitnux.org | 50 | 0.66% | 42,759 |
Wikipedia, for comparison, was cited three times in 7,534. The third-largest source is one vendor’s marketing blog guideflow.com sells interactive product demos. It is not a review site, a directory or a publisher, and it competes in none of the categories we asked about. Its blog was nonetheless cited 194 times across 96 of our 380 categories — a quarter of them — placing it third overall and ahead of Gartner. 相比之下，维基百科在 7,534 次引用中仅出现了 3 次。第三大来源是一家供应商的营销博客 guideflow.com，该公司销售交互式产品演示。它既不是评论网站、目录网站，也不是出版商，且在我们询问的任何类别中都不存在竞争关系。然而，其博客在我们的 380 个类别中的 96 个（即四分之一）里被引用了 194 次，使其总排名第三，甚至超过了 Gartner。
Each citation is a different URL: 96 distinct guideflow.com blog URLs, one per category, six of them the Estonian-locale copy of a post. Its sitemap lists 3,351 blog URLs, 2,176 of them distinct posts. It supplied the grounding for “3D rendering software”, “IVR software”, “RFID software” and “architecture practice software” alike. Nothing here is deceptive. Guideflow publishes a large content-marketing blog, as thousands of companies do. The measurement is about what the retrieval layer does with it: a vendor’s own listicles about markets it does not operate in became the third-largest evidence base for a question about which product to buy. 每次引用都是不同的 URL：96 个不同的 guideflow.com 博客 URL，每个类别一个，其中 6 个是帖子的爱沙尼亚语版本。其网站地图列出了 3,351 个博客 URL，其中 2,176 个是不同的帖子。它为“3D 渲染软件”、“IVR 软件”、“RFID 软件”和“建筑事务所软件”等提供了基础信息。这里没有任何欺骗行为。Guideflow 像成千上万家公司一样发布大型内容营销博客。我们的测量重点在于检索层如何处理这些内容：一家供应商关于其未涉足市场的自制清单文章，竟成为了关于“购买何种产品”这一问题的第三大证据来源。
Facts and grounding pages
事实与基础信息页面
Three other sites in the top ten and just below it are wifitalents.com (71 citations, 27 categories), worldmetrics.org (60, 22) and gitnux.org (50, 23). Together they account for 181 citations, 2.4% of the total, and appear in 41 of the 380 categories. They appear to be one operation. All three were registered through NameCheap between December 2023 and May 2024, all three delegate DNS to the same pair of Cloudflare nameservers, pam.ns.cloudflare.com and sean.ns.cloudflare.com, and all three run the same page template with the same navigation — Services, Market Data, Software Advice, Editorial Process, Company. 排名前十及紧随其后的另外三个网站是 wifitalents.com（71 次引用，27 个类别）、worldmetrics.org（60 次引用，22 个类别）和 gitnux.org（50 次引用，23 个类别）。它们总共贡献了 181 次引用，占总数的 2.4%，并出现在 380 个类别中的 41 个里。它们看起来属于同一个运营主体。这三个网站均在 2023 年 12 月至 2024 年 5 月期间通过 NameCheap 注册，DNS 均指向同一对 Cloudflare 名称服务器（pam.ns.cloudflare.com 和 sean.ns.cloudflare.com），且都运行相同的页面模板，具有相同的导航栏——服务、市场数据、软件建议、编辑流程、公司。
Each also keeps a blog of exactly six posts, and all eighteen are about the other brands in the set: two posts each on the other two, and two on a fourth brand, zipdo.co, which sits on the same nameserver pair and gives its own homepage the same “Facts & Grounding Page” title. Sharing a nameserver pair is strong circumstantial evidence of a common Cloudflare account rather than proof of ownership, but the template, the taxonomy and the blogs match item for item. Their scale is the point. Their sitemaps list 103,578, 107,083 and 105,541 URLs, of which 70,731, 71,684 and 72,713 are /best/
There are not 215,128 software categories. The self-description is what makes them unusual. Fetched on 2 September 2026, worldmetrics.org and gitnux.org both return an HTML title of the form