Someone built 215,000 pages to game your AI

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three websites published 215,128 pages titled “best software,” most of them machine-generated, and an AI search engine treated a good chunk of them as evidence. That is the core finding of a Trellner Research investigation into where Perplexity’s product recommendations come from, and it should sit uncomfortably with anyone who has started asking an AI which tool to buy.

The numbers are worse than the headline. Trellner looked at 7,534 citations behind Perplexity’s software picks across 380 categories. Nearly 60 percent pointed to domains ranked below the top 100,000 sites on the Tranco list. Wikipedia got cited three times. A single vendor’s marketing blog was cited 194 times, ahead of Gartner, in categories that had nothing to do with what it sells. Three of the biggest source domains registered within months of each other, share the same nameservers, and put “Facts & Grounding Page” in their homepage title. One recommended vendor’s link redirected to an Indonesian gambling site.

Search on Dr. Hitesh Sarda

Someone built 215,000 pages to game your AI