Every category where a model named Kong AI Gateway for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
LLM gateways and observability	Data platform	2%	7 of 63	17%	18	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Kong AI Gateway yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Kong AI Gateway across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0	1	1
GPT-5.4 mini	0	2	0	1	3
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	2	0	0	2
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	0	1	2
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	1	0	1
Mistral Small	0	0	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	0	0	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	1	0	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	1	0	1
Kimi K2	0	1	1	0	2
GLM 4.7 FlashX	1	0	1	0	2
MiniMax M2.5	0	1	0	0	1

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct11 labelsNone

Paraphrase3 labels1

Comparative22 labels1not counted in share

Budget-constrained5 labels1

Scale-constrained3 labelsNone

Negative10 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative54 labels in all, every segment counted; 2 of the 3 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Top Recommendation: nexos.ai (or Kong AI Gateway)” GLM 4.7 FlashX · LLM gateways · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“2. Kong AI Gateway: A platform that brings LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic into a unified control plane” Llama 4 Maverick · LLM gateways · paraphrase prompt · alternative

“Choose Kong AI Gateway if your company already standardizes on Kong/API mesh infrastructure” Perplexity Sonar · LLM gateways · direct prompt · alternative

“powerful if you already standardize on Kong; heavier if you just want a lightweight LLM router” GPT-5.4 mini · LLM gateways · comparative prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“the operational weight is hard to justify for LLM routing alone if you're not already a Kong shop” Claude Haiku 4.5 · LLM gateways · comparative prompt · soft negative

“it's generally more of an enterprise API-management path than the cheapest one for a small budget” GPT-5.4 mini · LLM gateways · budget prompt · soft negative

“Best if you already use Kong; otherwise the learning curve may not be worth it” Perplexity Sonar · LLM gateways · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Kong AI Gateway, over the 54 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Kong AI Gateway was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

LiteLLM51 of 5414Not in the top three

Portkey47 of 547Not in the top three

Bifrost31 of 5413Not in the top three

Cloudflare AI Gateway30 of 541Not in the top three

OpenRouter29 of 544Not in the top three

Helicone20 of 541Not in the top three

TrueFoundry11 of 541Not in the top three

Braintrust Gateway10 of 542Not in the top three

Vercel AI Gateway6 of 541Not in the top three

Langfuse5 of 541Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Kong AI Gateway. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 45 of the 54 answers that named Kong AI Gateway and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

getmaxim.ai29

dataiku.com20

dev.to20

braintrust.dev17

truefoundry.com17

orq.ai16

respan.ai16

cloudzero.com15

gbhackers.com12

konghq.com10

172 of the 172 domain citations in answers naming Kong AI Gateway came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

dataiku.com/blog/best-llm-gateways20

getmaxim.ai/articles/top-5-llm-gateways-in-2026-a-production-ready-comparison20

orq.ai/blog/best-llm-gateways16

cloudzero.com/blog/llm-gateways15

getmaxim.ai/articles/best-enterprise-llm-gateways-in-2026-a-comparative-guide15

truefoundry.com/blog/best-llm-gateways14

respan.ai/articles/best-llm-gateways13

gbhackers.com/top-5-ai-gateways-for-enterprise-2026-guide11

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Kong AI Gateway

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Kong AI Gateway; a claim can dispute any of them.

Kong 4Kong AI 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Kong AI Gateway's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Kong AI Gateway, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at kong.io is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.