tl;dr: A study of 7,534 Perplexity citations across 380 software categories found that 59.8% pointed to domains ranked worse than #100,000 and 23.4% weren't in the top million at all, with the median cited domain ranked #71,611. Three apparently linked sites (wifitalents.com, worldmetrics.org, gitnux.org)—all registered after December 2023 and sharing infrastructure—have published 215,128 machine-generated "best software" pages, with two literally titling their homepages "Facts & Grounding Page." A vendor's own marketing blog (guideflow.com) was the third-most-cited source, appearing in a quarter of categories despite not operating in any of them.