Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

Posted by jakobgreenfeld 17 hours ago

Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them(trellner.com)

363 points | 167 commentspage 3

nightpool 12 hours ago|

Cool, but, uh, this seems really astroturfed? Why are there two anti-Perplexity articles from independent research firms with identical websites on the front-page of HN right now, submitted by the same person? Feels like they should get deleted

(see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536201)

chermi 15 hours ago||

If you let a plain llm search the internet with no guidance, it's basically a string matcher with no concept of quality. I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?

kjs3 12 hours ago|

I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?

Yes, and the whole point of the OP is they aren't.

ricardobeat 16 hours ago||

Honestly, I will just flag every post that is entirely AI slop from now on. This has to stop.

The home page for this "independent research firm" is also 100% nonsense [1]. "The record a machine reads is not the one a company writes.". Ironically this low-effort spam is exactly what this report warns about, and does not belong in HN - or anywhere else.

[1] https://trellner.com/

Capricorn2481 23 minutes ago||

Unfortunately a large amount of people on this particular site love this, and they will meet your disgust with equal enthusiasm. Many people on here fancy themselves kindred spirits with the most ghoulish VCs you could imagine, and to them, an AI filled internet is a sign the system is working, and approval is a chance to be part of the elite who "get it."

shrikant 16 hours ago||

Also, that user's last four (three of them in the last hour) submissions have all been similar "finding" reports from a Claude-generated mystery research group website. All which contain exclusively AI slop articles. Ugh.

ricardobeat 10 hours ago|||

Interesting. They posted this not long ago: https://jakobgreenfeld.com/smart-web/

kjs3 12 hours ago|||

I speculate pretty soon they won't even bother with a website meatbags can browse to. It'll all be fed by links to links to api endpoints that stream training data to push models in the desired direction.

luciana1u 15 hours ago||

The search engine is now the citation, and the citation is a page that exists to be cited. Nobody in that loop has read anything, and it still works.

PaulHoule 12 hours ago||

What do you expect? "Best X" is the most spammed category of all spammed categories.

a2ff6eeb0 16 hours ago||

Makes sense. Manipulating training data so that models will recommend your product is undoubtedly a big industry.

brador 4 hours ago||

Fresh install of windows, opened edge, searched Bing for “firefox” first result (paid ad) was malware masquerading as Firefox.

dominotw 16 hours ago||

my friend works for a company called 'profound' whose whole job is 'get found by ai' by spamming reddit and other talk sites ( among other things)

mkw5053 16 hours ago||

They've raised $155M total now with the latest at a $1B valuation [1] from Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla, and NVIDIA.

And very impressive list of angels too: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Andrew Karam (AppLovin) among others

Last I heard they're trying to reposition from AEO/GEO to "AI Marketer". No clue how that's going, I feel like the AEO/GEO stuff isn't super defensible at that valuation if for no other reason than I assume (hope) the spamming stops working.

[1] https://dealroom.co/news/126181-profound-raises-96m-at-1b-va...

phoghed 16 hours ago||

SEO companies were already doing this. There were already tools applying ML to the problem before LLMs too, that would recommend places you could post relevant content, like Reddit, yahoo answers (lmao), quora, etc.

bensyverson 16 hours ago||

An SEO tale as old as time

j2kun 13 hours ago|

It's DecorMyEyes for a new generation of tech.

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