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Explore Ideas, Data, and Stories from the Frontlines of AI Search

How to Write a Good llms.txt File (2026)
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How to Write a Good llms.txt File (2026)

An llms.txt file is a routing page for coding agents, not a copy of your documentation. Where to put it, how to group the links, and what to check before you ship it.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
What Makes Good Agent Documentation? Complete Guide (2026)
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What Makes Good Agent Documentation? Complete Guide (2026)

Documentation took 55% of page fetches across 500 tracked coding-agent runs. Seven requirements for docs an agent can finish a real task with, plus a method for testing them the way an agent would use them.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Should you have an llms.txt?
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Should you have an llms.txt?

Absolutely yes. Coding agents use llms.txt to understand your product and navigate your documentation, and our research shows how often they read it.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
How Claude Code Searches the Web
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How Claude Code Searches the Web

Claude Code uses two separate web pipelines: a server-side search that returns links and findings, and a local fetch that sends a page through Markdown conversion and usually a Haiku extraction pass.

Evan DoyleEvan Doyle
Open Models Are Useful Proxies for Claude and Codex Preferences
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Open Models Are Useful Proxies for Claude and Codex Preferences

Open models show similar preferences compared to Claude and Codex across 1,000+ sessions. That makes them useful for efficiently finding opportunities.

Evan DoyleEvan Doyle
What is Agent Experience?
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What is Agent Experience?

Agent Experience is the practice of making products easy for AI agents to discover, understand, use, and recover with. Learn how to measure AX and improve docs, onboarding, errors, URLs, and APIs.

Grant EvansGrant Evans
What is Agent Preference Optimization?
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What is Agent Preference Optimization?

Agent Preference Optimization is how companies measure and improve whether coding agents choose their product. Here is how to establish a baseline, understand why competitors win, act on the evidence, and track the result.

Grant EvansGrant Evans
Does Codex Read llms.txt? You Have to Look in the Right Place
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Does Codex Read llms.txt? You Have to Look in the Right Place

Server logs showed no ChatGPT-User requests for llms.txt. Instrumented sessions showed exactly where those reads went.

Evan DoyleEvan Doyle
What Is llms.txt Used For? Data From Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sessions
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What Is llms.txt Used For? Data From Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sessions

Coding agents opened llms.txt in 36.3% of build sessions, but only 0.5% of vendor-selection sessions. The task determines whether the file matters.

Evan DoyleEvan Doyle
Write Medium-Quality Content
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Write Medium-Quality Content

Humans should decide what content says, AI should write most of the prose, and humans should review the result.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
How and Why You Should Serve Markdown Pages to Agents
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How and Why You Should Serve Markdown Pages to Agents

Serve a Markdown version of every docs URL so agents get cleaner context, current package versions, exact install commands, and a map of your docs.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
What is Agent Led Growth? How Coding Agents Choose Software
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What is Agent Led Growth? How Coding Agents Choose Software

Coding agents now choose and install the tools developers build with. Agent Led Growth is the channel that decides which tool wins, and it has two halves: get recommended, then get implemented properly.

Grant EvansGrant Evans
How PostHog uses Gauge to win AEO
Case Study

How PostHog uses Gauge to win AEO

How Natalia Amorim used Gauge to Increase Posthog LLM Traffic 41x.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Expect Higher Visibility on Grok. Lower on Perplexity. A Study of Brand Mentions from 17M+ Answers
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Expect Higher Visibility on Grok. Lower on Perplexity. A Study of Brand Mentions from 17M+ Answers

Grok mentions more than double than brands Perplexity does while OpenAI and Anthropic land in the middle.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
How Braintrust Built a Marketing Engine for the AI-Native Buyer
Case Study

How Braintrust Built a Marketing Engine for the AI-Native Buyer

How Braintrust's Head of Growth Marketing, Raman Hundal, built an AI-search content engine from scratch and grew their visibility from 2.5% to 45% of AI answers in their space.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
ChatGPT Ads: What to Track and How Gauge Makes It Easy via MCP
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ChatGPT Ads: What to Track and How Gauge Makes It Easy via MCP

ChatGPT ads are live and self-serve. Here's what to track, how they differ from Google Ads, and how Gauge connects paid performance to organic AI visibility via MCP.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Full Guide to Tracking and Fixing AI Brand Sentiment
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Full Guide to Tracking and Fixing AI Brand Sentiment

Complete guide to understanding how AI speaks about your brand and how to optimize for it.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Why First-Party Content Is the Highest-Leverage Move in GEO
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Why First-Party Content Is the Highest-Leverage Move in GEO

Understanding the different forms of content, and why first party content is the most effective strategy for GEO.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
How Agencies Can Use AEO Audits to Close Clients
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How Agencies Can Use AEO Audits to Close Clients

Learn how to use AI visibility audits to close GEO clients before they commit, using real data from Gauge.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
AEO KPIs: The Key Metrics for Measuring AI Search Performance
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AEO KPIs: The Key Metrics for Measuring AI Search Performance

A quick discovery of the core AEO metrics that help teams understand how to navigate Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
ChatGPT Ads Just Went Public
Announcement

ChatGPT Ads Just Went Public

ChatGPT Ads just opened to all US businesses at ads.openai.com. Here's what launched, what it changes for marketers, and how Gauge gives you visibility into the new ad surface from day one.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
How to Optimize Content for AI Citations
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How to Optimize Content for AI Citations

A step-by-step guide covering how AI retrieval works, what on-page and authority signals move citation rate, what technical mistakes block it, and how to measure and repeat the cycle with Gauge.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Sentiment Analysis: See What AI Actually Thinks About You
Announcement

Sentiment Analysis: See What AI Actually Thinks About You

See what AI is actually saying about your brand, including key themes, pros and cons, and direct quotes pulled from the full text of every answer. Now live for every Gauge customer.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Track Branded Prompts with Gauge
Announcement

Track Branded Prompts with Gauge

Track prompts that explicitly ask about your brand, and see exactly how AI describes your product to buyers who already know your name. Powers our new Sentiment Analysis feature. Now live in Gauge.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
How to Build a Blog with Next.js: Three Approaches to Content Management
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How to Build a Blog with Next.js: Three Approaches to Content Management

In this post, we overview several different approaches to building a marketing blog for site built on Next.js.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
Sanctum: From 16.7% to 47.5% AI Visibility in 6 Months
Case Study

Sanctum: From 16.7% to 47.5% AI Visibility in 6 Months

Sanctum powers liquid staking for some of the biggest names in crypto. See how they went from 16.7% to 47.5% AI visibility and became a top 5 cited domain with Gauge.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Introducing Reddit Citation Tracking
Announcement

Introducing Reddit Citation Tracking

See which subreddits and Reddit threads are driving citations across AI answers in your space, and which ones mention your brand. Now live in Gauge.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Ask Gauge Now Has Memory
Announcement

Ask Gauge Now Has Memory

Ask Gauge now retains persistent context about your company, competitors, content strategy, and writing style across every session, written automatically as you work. Live for every Gauge user.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Ask Gauge: The Agentic Marketer
Announcement

Ask Gauge: The Agentic Marketer

Gauge is your marketing agent for organic, paid, and AI search.

Caelean BarnesCaelean Barnes
How LedgerUp 17x'd Their AI Visibility in One Month
Case Study

How LedgerUp 17x'd Their AI Visibility in One Month

See how LedgerUp boosted AI visibility 1713% in less than 30 days, dominating AI search with Gauge.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
How Vellum Dominated AI Search in a Matter of Months
Case Study

How Vellum Dominated AI Search in a Matter of Months

How Vellum went from 1.4% AI visibility to 40.3% visibility in just 7 months

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
The Gauge MCP is Live
Announcement

The Gauge MCP is Live

Connect Gauge to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any other MCP-compatible AI assistant and query your visibility data, citations, and SEO metrics directly from inside the conversation. Now live.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
Google Ads is Now Live in Gauge
Announcement

Google Ads is Now Live in Gauge

Connect your Google Ads account to see paid search performance alongside your AI visibility, citations, and organic data inside Gauge. Now live.

Farbod MemarianFarbod Memarian
How to Write Listicles That Rank in AI Search: (Best practices from 29 million answers analyzed)
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How to Write Listicles That Rank in AI Search: (Best practices from 29 million answers analyzed)

Guide on how to write listicles that get your brand mentioned more in AI Search

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
5 Lessons I’ve Learned Tracking Millions of AI Answers
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5 Lessons I’ve Learned Tracking Millions of AI Answers

5 Lessons I’ve Learned Tracking Millions of AI Answers - Caelean Barnes

Caelean BarnesCaelean Barnes
How Eco 5x’d Their AI Visibility in Under 4 Weeks
Case Study

How Eco 5x’d Their AI Visibility in Under 4 Weeks

See how Eco boosted AI visibility 416% in less than 30 days, dominating stablecoin search with Gauge.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
How Standard Metrics more than Doubled Their AI Visibility in Two Weeks
Case Study

How Standard Metrics more than Doubled Their AI Visibility in Two Weeks

A strategic partnership with Gauge delivers rapid, measurable results for the leading VC portfolio monitoring platform.

Ethan FinkelEthan Finkel
What is Gauge?
Announcement

What is Gauge?

What Gauge is and how it works: track what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about your brand, find the gaps, and publish content that wins more AI answers.

Caelean BarnesCaelean Barnes
Gauge Raises $2.4M to Build the Future of Marketing to AI
Announcement

Gauge Raises $2.4M to Build the Future of Marketing to AI

Gauge has raised $2.4M in pre-seed funding after YC to help companies understand and shape how AI represent them.

Caelean BarnesCaelean Barnes

Stop Prompting and Start Measuring

Get the complete toolkit you need to fully own, understand, and improve your brand's presence in AI.

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FAQs

Find answers to common questions about AEO, GEO, and AI SEO, as well as Gauge's application and services.

Gauge Chat helps your brand get recommended when people ask AI for answers. It tracks your visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI search platforms, shows how you compare to competitors, and helps you create content that earns mentions and citations.

Gauge Agents helps developer tools get selected and implemented by coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. It shows how agents discover your product, read your docs, and attempt integrations, so you can identify what makes them choose your tool or abandon it.

Use Gauge Chat to improve how AI answers describe and recommend your brand. Use Gauge Agents to improve whether coding agents choose your product and successfully build with it. You can explore either product using the Chat / Agents switch at the top of this page.

Many people are incorrectly saying that "SEO is dead". This is objectively false, and we see so in the data.

SEO and AI optimization are highly correlated. This is because AI is using search tools to retrieve data from the internet. This means we're still optimizing for search.

That being said, there are unique aspects of how AI searches the web that creates opportunities for brands. AI does not suffer the same sharp attention span dropoff that humans do; it also cares significantly less about things like domain authority. Instead, AI is solely focused on the relevancy of the search result and corresponding content to the original user query.

Because of this, AI will typically pull the top ~50 results for a given search, and distribute attributions much more evenly than Google. Humans almost never click past the first page; AI does every time. This means we can target the long tail for as many keywords as possible, rather than fight tooth-and-nail for the #1 position on a SERP.

There are several key metrics that are important to think about with respect to AI search:

  1. Mention Rate: What % of tracked AI answers is my brand mentioned in?
  2. Citation Rate: What % of tracked AI answers cite my website?
  3. Referral Traffic: How much traffic is AI sending directly to my website? What URLs are seeing the most traffic?

It's important to note that all of these measurements are imperfect in some way. Citation and Mention rate are only as good as the prompts configured. This is where Gauge's detailed research that finds real usecases and pain points becomes critical. Referral traffic also only represents a tiny fraction of your true visibility across AI answers, as users infrequently actually click on citations in generative engines. Estimates show that you may see as much as 100x the number of sessions where your brand is referenced when compared to the number of clickthroughs that will register to your web properties.

Gauge offers two plans:

  1. Growth (most popular) - $599 monthly for 600 prompts run through all leading models daily with 18 articles created by Gauge's content engine monthly
  2. Enterprise - custom plans and pricing for larger firms

Most users select the growth plan with larger firms often opting for enterprise.

Typical customers see anywhere from a 3x-5x uplift in their AI visibility within the first month of using Gauge. This is contingent on the implementation and execution of the recommendations and workflows that Gauge supports.

Gauge is the only complete tookit that offers everything you need to understand and improve your presence in AI. Built by technical teams with deep experience in data, Gauge is different than many other tools that focus on marketing over engineering.

Gauge goes a step further than simply asking "best X" or "top Y". By researching real search intent volumes and mapping your competitors web presences, Gauge is able to track the real usecases and pain points that your prospects are asking. Instead of simply hitting APIs, Gauge pulls real data from the true web experiences that the models are surfacing to users. This data differs significantly from what many naive implementations find, and results in much higher correlation to the real world experiences your prospects are encountering.

Gauge also goes a step further beyond simple prompt tracking. With its data-driven content engine, Gauge fully owns the end-to-end workflow of improving your brands' visibility in AI.

Gauge is an AI marketing platform built around Ask Gauge, an AI agent that helps marketers analyze performance, identify opportunities, and execute work in plain language. Its capabilities include:

  • AI marketing agent: Ask questions about your data, investigate performance changes, manage prompts and topics, and create content through conversation. Ask Gauge remembers your brand context and preferences.
  • AI visibility tracking: Monitor brand mentions, rankings, and website citation rates in AI answers over time, with breakdowns by prompt and topic.
  • Competitor analysis: Compare your visibility with competitors, find prompts where they appear and you do not, and investigate the sources supporting their presence.
  • Sentiment analysis: Understand how AI describes your brand and how that perception compares with competitors across topics.
  • Prompt management: Create and organize prompts, topics, keywords, and tags, and inspect the answers behind your metrics.
  • Citation analysis: Identify the domains and pages AI cites, track changes in citation performance, and find gaps in your own content.
  • Query fanout analysis: See the search queries AI models generate behind the scenes when answering prompts.
  • Content research and strategy: Research keywords, analyze existing content and cited pages, and prioritize topics based on search data and visibility gaps.
  • Content creation and publishing: Generate briefs, outlines, and articles, refresh existing content, and publish to connected platforms including Webflow, Framer, and Sanity.
  • Content and task management: Organize content in a shared library, plan a content calendar, and manage recommended actions from discovery through completion.
  • SEO and traffic analysis: Analyze Google Search Console performance and Google Analytics traffic, including visits from AI referrals, alongside AI visibility data.
  • Social citation tracking: Find Reddit threads and, when enabled, YouTube videos cited in AI answers, including citations that mention your brand.
  • ChatGPT ad monitoring: Track brands and ads appearing in monitored ChatGPT responses.
  • Reporting: Turn analysis into charts, reports, and presentation decks for sharing findings and recommendations.