How three dummy sites gamed Perplexity's citation engine

Three dummy websites manufactured over 215,000 auto-generated software pages to hijack Perplexity's search results.

A new investigation tested Perplexity’s sonar and sonar-pro models across 380 software categories on OpenRouter. Out of 7,534 citations returned, 59.8% belonged to low-tier domains outside the top 100,000, and 23.4% weren't in the top million at all. Three connected sites—wifitalents.com, worldmetrics.org, and gitnux.org—published 215,128 machine-generated buying guides, even titling their homepages "Facts & Grounding Page" to target AI search crawlers.

Why it matters: AI search engines struggle to filter low-authority web content. Anyone can script thousands of fake recommendation pages, label them with retrieval-friendly metadata, and become a top source for buyers.

Here's the gist: a vendor blog, guideflow.com, became the third-largest source overall with 194 citations—beating out Gartner—despite competing in none of the software markets tested.

Next time an AI gives you product advice, remember it might just be quoting SEO spam designed to trick the model.