The citation graph just got a spam injection. researchers found perplexity citing over 215,000…
the citation graph just got a spam injection. researchers found perplexity citing over 215,000 ai-generated pages, three sites mass-producing best-software listicles to game retrieval, per oct 9 reporting.
the authority list just became the attack surface.
Context
A Trellner Research study ran 380 software categories through Perplexity's sonar models and found 59.8 percent of 7,534 citations went to domains ranked worse than 100,000. Three linked sites had published 215,128 machine-made 'best software' pages.
On The Wire says none of the three sites was created before December 2023, and some pages were titled for the model to read.
The three sites and the roughly 215,000 pages match the study coverage. The coverage read is dated Sep 2 and 3, 2026, not Oct 9, so 'per oct 9 reporting' does not match the dates seen. 'Over 215,000' matches 215,128. 'Attack surface' is the author's.
'the authority list just became the attack surface' is the author's opinion.
Related work
Watch next
- Find the Trellner Research paper itself for the method.
Sources
- AI/TLDR, Sep 2, 2026ai-tldr.dev
- On The Wire, Sep 2, 2026onthewire.ai
- Generative Labs, Sep 3, 2026generativelabs.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 11 October 2026 at 05:21 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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