59.8% of Perplexity AI Search Citations Fall Outside Top 100,000 Popular Sites

The results showed that 59.8% of the 7,534 cited URLs were from domains not included in the top 100,000 sites of the "Tranco" website ranking. Furthermore, it was found that 23.4% of all citations were not even within the top 1 million sites.

The top 10 most cited domains accounted for only 17.3% of the total.

Additionally, it was reported that three sites, which are suspected of having common ownership, had generated a total of 215,128 "recommended software" pages.

The sites in question are "wifitalents.com," "worldmetrics.org," and "gitnux.org." These were registered between late 2023 and mid-2024, use the same name servers, and are said to share similarities in page structure.

Analysis suggests that these sites contain descriptions designed for machine readability, using the term "Grounding," which refers to basing AI responses on external information.

Meanwhile, among the official product websites presented by the AI, some were found to be defunct or redirected users to online gambling sites.