An investigation into Perplexity's various models across 380 software categories has revealed that a large number of the cited URLs used in its responses are concentrated within specific sites.
Three specific sites generated 210,000 pages cited by Perplexity
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Through this investigation, 2,055 domains were identified from 3,800 recommended slots. Of these, 751 domains—accounting for 36.5%—do not appear in the Tranco top 1,000,000. Many of these unranked domains are newer than those that are ranked, with 16.6% of them being sites first archived in 2025 or later.
A particularly notable example is guideflow.com. Rather than being a review site or a directory, this site is a company that sells interactive product demos; however, it accumulated a total of 194 citations across 96 out of the 380 categories, making it the third most cited source, surpassing Gartner.
Furthermore, it is believed that three domains, including other top-ranking sites, belong to the same operator. These three sites were registered between 2023-12 and 2024-05, and share common DNS server settings. It is reported that a total of 215,128 machine-generated "best <category>" pages have been published across these three domains.
Source: Three sites made 215,128 "best software" pages for AI. Perplexity cites them (Hacker News Frontpage, 2026-09-02)