GoKawiilStudy finds three AI-optimized sites dominate Perplexity's 'best software' citations
A study of 380 software categories found that nearly 60% of the sources Perplexity's Sonar models cite when recommending products come from domains ranked outside the top 100,000 sites by traffic, and almost a quarter aren't ranked at all. Three interlinked domains, none older than December 2023 and two with homepages literally titled 'Facts & Grounding Page', have published over 215,000 machine-generated 'best software' pages designed to be retrieved by AI models rather than read by humans.