The ai answer just cited its own spam. perplexity surfaced over 215,000 ai-generated spam pages in…
the ai answer just cited its own spam. perplexity surfaced over 215,000 ai-generated spam pages in search results, per oct 9 reporting.
the citation graph now feeds on its own output.
Context
Verified source date: Trellner Research published its study on Sep 2, 2026, finding that Perplexity's sonar models cite pages from three related sites that published 215,128 generated 'best software' pages, which got 181 of 7,534 citations in the test of 380 buyer-intent software categories (Bosnadev, Sep 2; Singulari, Sep 3).
Steal What Works (Sep 3) concludes the evidence points to Perplexity repeatedly letting spam-like publishers into its retrieval layer, not promoting them on purpose, and says four unusual high-volume publishers generated about 5 percent of citations.
The 215,128 figure matches the Trellner study, but it counts pages the three sites published, not pages Perplexity surfaced in results; the study counted citations in answers. The post says 'per oct 9 reporting'; the study sources read are dated Sep 2 to 3, 2026, so the Oct 9 date is not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. A separate Oct 10 audit (TRAIL Labs) found about 16 percent of sources cited by four AI search engines were AI-written. 'The citation graph now feeds on its own output' is the author's.
'the ai answer just cited its own spam' is the author's opinion.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the Oct 9 report on Perplexity spam pages, if one exists.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 11 October 2026 at 14:03 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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