Three sites have built 215,128 pages listing "best software" picks, and Perplexity cites them as sources, according to a report on trellner.com. The report's own reading of the pages is blunt about who they're written for: "These pages are addressed, in their titles and descriptions, to the software that reads them." The term for that process, grounding, describes the step where a retrieval system fetches documents to condition its answer on, not a step a human reader ever sees.

Into that same channel comes Growl, a tool launched on Fazier that checks whether Google's AI recommends a given business. Its free tier runs two questions once. The Standard plan, at $29 a month, runs four questions, re-measures them weekly, and emails the owner only in the weeks something changed, according to the product's own page.

Growl's maker is not claiming traction for it. The page states plainly: "I have no paying customers yet. I would rather write that than invent one."

That line sits oddly next to the report on the 215,128 pages. One tool tells a business owner whether an AI engine already knows about them. The other describes, at industrial scale, how AI engines can be fed sources that were built for exactly that purpose and not for a person to read. A business checking its own visibility with Growl has no way to know, from that check alone, whether the answer it gets back came from an independent judgment or from a page written to be picked up by the same kind of system Growl is querying.

Neither page says how many businesses Growl has checked, or how its questions are chosen.