# Keats vs Gauge: agent-first AEO tools compared

> In short: Gauge and Keats both expect an AI agent to do the work. Gauge goes further: daily tracking and publish-ready articles sent to your CMS, from $599/mo. Keats stays on measurement: five assistants weekly, a brief for each fix, and a verdict at day 21 and day 35, for much less. If you want the tool to ship content, pick Gauge; if your own agent writes and you need a verdict, pick Keats.

Comparison from Keats, published 2026-11-13, updated 2026-11-13. Canonical: https://getkeats.com/compare/keats-vs-gauge

Gauge calls itself "the agent-led growth platform," and of all the tools in this market it's the one closest to Keats in outlook: both assume an AI agent, not a person clicking through a dashboard, will do much of the work. They split on how much of that work the tool itself should do, and on what you pay for it.

What follows is drawn from Gauge's pricing and home pages, read on 12 November 2026.

## The core difference: who ships the change

Gauge carries the work through to the website. Its Growth plan includes 18 publish-ready articles a month, and approved articles go straight to Webflow, Framer, Sanity or a code-based blog on GitHub. It also tests how coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex talk about developer products, and can run those evaluations on pull requests. For a developer-tools company that wants to be recommended inside a coding agent, Gauge has thought about that problem and Keats hasn't.

Keats deliberately stops before publishing. Each gap gets a card with a brief: which questions it targets, who is named instead, which pages the assistant read, and what counts as done. Your agent, or your writer, drafts the change in your own tools and your own voice, and reports it live. Keats then measures it. The case for that split is in [running AEO with your AI agent](https://getkeats.com/guides/aeo-with-your-ai-agent): the person or agent who knows your product writes, and the tool that didn't write it judges it.

## Price and coverage, compared

As each company listed it on 12 November 2026.

| | Gauge | Keats |
|---|---|---|
| Paid plan to start | Growth, $599/mo | Starter, $49/mo |
| Volume | 600 prompts, about 54,000 answers a month | 50 questions on Starter, 750 questions on Agency |
| Assistants on the first plan | ChatGPT, AI Mode, Copilot; Claude and Grok on your own keys | ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity |
| Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity | Enterprise | Every plan |
| Cadence | Daily | Weekly, several answers per question |
| Content | 18 articles a month, published to your CMS | Briefs; Keats never publishes |
| Measuring a change | Visibility and AI traffic over time | Control questions, verdicts at day 21 and day 35 |
| Agent access | MCP server, open-source CLI | REST API and MCP server on every plan |
| Free option | Gauge Agents: credits, no card | 14-day trial |
| Seats | 3 on Growth | Teammates unlimited |

## Where Gauge is ahead

Execution and volume. Six hundred prompts a day is a lot of data, and articles that arrive in your CMS ready to approve remove the step Keats leaves to you. Gauge connects to GA4, Search Console and Slack, reports AI traffic, and its open-source CLI lets you run evaluations locally with your own Claude Code or Codex subscription. It covers Copilot, which Keats doesn't, and it has customer numbers on its home page: PostHog, it says, saw 41 times more LLM-referred traffic. Its free Gauge Agents tier needs no card.

## Where Keats is ahead

Gauge's first paid plan doesn't include Gemini, AI Overviews or Perplexity; they come with Enterprise. Keats has all three on its $49/mo plan, along with AI Mode and ChatGPT. For a business whose buyers search Google, that's most of where AI answers are read.

Keats's evaluation is controlled. A verdict compares the questions your change aimed at with [control questions](https://getkeats.com/glossary/control-questions) it didn't, at day 21 and day 35, so a model update that lifts everyone doesn't get credited to your page. And the [noise band](https://getkeats.com/glossary/noise-band) on every weekly number tells you whether this week's move is real before you build a story on it.

## Gauge suits you if

- You sell developer tools and care how coding agents recommend you.
- You want the tool to produce and publish the articles.
- Daily data across hundreds of prompts is worth the Growth price.

## Keats suits you if

- Your agent or team already writes, and you need to know what to write next.
- Google's AI answers, Gemini and Perplexity matter on day one.
- You have to prove each change worked, not just that the line went up.

Compare the enterprise approach in [our page on the large-brand platform](https://getkeats.com/compare/keats-vs-profound), or see every option in [the 2026 roundup](https://getkeats.com/compare/best-aeo-tools).


## Where each is better than Keats

- **Gauge:** Gauge writes 18 publish-ready articles a month on Growth and sends them to Webflow, Framer, Sanity or GitHub; Keats writes briefs and never publishes. Gauge also checks daily, covers Copilot (and Claude or Grok with your own keys), reports AI traffic, evaluates coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex, has a free no-card tier and an open-source CLI, and publishes customer results such as PostHog's.

## Sources

- [Gauge: pricing](https://withgauge.com/pricing), read 2026-11-12
- [Gauge: home page](https://withgauge.com), read 2026-11-12
- [Keats: llms.txt, what Keats does and what each plan includes](https://getkeats.com/llms.txt), read 2026-11-12