Most Perplexity Citations in One September Study Sat Far Outside the Top Sites
A 2 September 2026 Perplexity sample found 59.8 percent of citations on domains ranked worse than 100,000.
Direct answer
Trelner Research's 2 September 2026 Perplexity sample collected 7,534 citations. 59.8 percent pointed at domains ranked worse than 100,000 on the Tranco top million, and 23.4 percent were absent from that list.
Perplexity's citation list is not a rerun of a classic authority ranking. Trelner Research, writing on 2 September 2026, sent 760 API calls across 380 buyer-intent categories to Perplexity's grounded models. The run produced 7,534 citations spanning 2,055 domains.
Of those citations, 59.8 percent pointed at domains ranked worse than 100,000 on the Tranco top-million list. Another 23.4 percent pointed at domains that were not on that list at all. Among citations that did have a Tranco rank, the median rank was 71,611. Retrieval here lined up with pages the model could extract, not with the usual head of the web.
A small set of generated sites still showed up
The same study found three domains under apparent common control, wifitalents.com, worldmetrics.org, and gitnux.org, holding 215,128 machine-generated pages and earning 181 citations, 2.4 percent of the total. They appeared together in 41 of the 380 categories. One of them out-cited Gartner inside its category.
The practical GEO reading is uncomfortable. A backlink audit will not show why those URLs grounded an answer. The useful check is the actual URLs attached to competitor recommendations, including pages that would never rank in a traditional top ten.
Source: GeoAura, citing Trelner Research.
FAQ
- How big was the sample?
- 760 API calls across 380 buyer-intent categories on Perplexity's grounded models, producing 7,534 citations from 2,055 domains.
- Did a few generated sites capture citations?
- Three domains under apparent common control, with 215,128 machine-generated pages, earned 181 citations, 2.4 percent of the total.