Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them We asked two web-grounded models for the best products in 380 software categories and kept every URL they retrieved. Of th
By Coderz Club · 2026-09-02 · Tags: ai, software
Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
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 <category> pages between them; none of the three domains existed before December 2023. What we ran 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. 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. Where the citations land Citations Unranked (outside Tranco 1M) Ranked worse than #100k perplexity/sonar 3,767 23.4% 59.8% perplexity/sonar-pro 3,767 23.5% 59.9% Pooled 7,534 23.4% 59.8% 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. The ten most-cited domains: 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. 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. Facts and grounding pages 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. 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
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 <category> pages between them; none of the three domains existed before December 2023. What we ran 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. 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. Where the citations land Citations Unranked (outside Tranco 1M) Ranked worse than #100k perplexity/sonar 3,767 23.4% 59.8% perplexity/sonar-pro 3,767 23.5% 59.9% Pooled 7,534 23.4% 59.8% 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. The ten most-cited domains: 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. 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. Facts and grounding pages 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. 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