# Limelit vs Gauge: Which AI Visibility Platform Fits a Lean Team?

- Canonical: https://limelit.co/blog/limelit-vs-gauge-which-ai-visibility-platform-fits-a-lean-team
- Published: 2026-09-05
- Publisher: Limelit (https://limelit.co)

> Limelit vs Gauge: Gauge is a $599 a month platform that keeps Claude behind Enterprise, while Limelit starts free with all six engines and drafts the fix itself.

> **TL;DR**
> - Both platforms track whether AI answer engines name your brand, which competitors get named instead, and which sources the engines cite. Both then draft content to close the gaps.
> - [Gauge](https://www.withgauge.com) is a Y Combinator company selling one self-serve plan at $599 a month (600 prompts a day, six platforms, 18 drafted articles a month) plus a custom Enterprise tier. Claude and Grok tracking live in Enterprise. Its newer second product measures which tools coding agents like Claude Code and Codex install.
> - [Limelit](https://limelit.co) starts free with 1,000 credits, no card and no subscription. Every account gets all six engines it tracks, unlimited seats and properties, a free AI-readiness audit, Cross Check for the claims AI makes about you, and drafts that publish to a blog on your own domain.

Choose Limelit if you want to see your AI visibility this week without a $599 line item, need Claude data without an enterprise contract, or want the platform to draft and fact-check the fix rather than only report the gap. Choose Gauge if you have the budget, want 600 prompts refreshed every day with Microsoft Copilot included, and want a vendor team that runs recurring strategy sessions with you.

## The question both tools answer

Your Google rankings are fine and your pipeline is down. Someone on the team asks ChatGPT which tool to buy in your category and a competitor is named twice. You are not in the answer at all.

Search Console cannot show you that. Neither can an SEO suite, because answer engines do not rank pages. They synthesize one answer from a handful of sources, and either your brand is inside it or it is not. Answer engine optimization (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimization (GEO), is the work of measuring that and fixing it. Gauge and Limelit are two of the tools built for it, aimed at different buyers.

## Gauge vs Limelit: side by side

| | **Gauge** | **Limelit** |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price to start | $599 a month (Growth), one-week trial. The earlier $99 Starter plan has been removed | Free: 1,000 credits on signup, no card, no subscription |
| How you pay | Monthly plan, Enterprise is custom | Prepaid credits that never expire. $50 buys 5,250, $500 buys 60,000. 1 credit is $0.01 of usage |
| Engines on the entry tier | ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode |
| Claude tracking | Enterprise only | Included on every account |
| Copilot and Grok tracking | Copilot on Growth, Grok on Enterprise | Not tracked |
| Prompt volume | 600 prompts a day, refreshed daily | Set by you, metered per run. The cost is shown before every run and a spend cap stops overruns |
| Seats | 10 on Growth | Unlimited |
| Brands and competitors | Unlimited domains and competitors | Unlimited properties and competitors |
| Content | 18 publish-ready articles a month from the content engine, publishing to Webflow, Framer, Sanity and GitHub | Drafts grounded in the gap evidence (about 550 credits each), reviewed in the editor, published to a blog served on your own domain |
| Fact-checking AI claims | Sentiment analysis with themes and excerpts | Cross Check: extracts the factual claims AI makes about you and verifies each against versioned sources you control |
| Site readiness | Page health score inside the Action Center | Free AI-readiness audit and crawler check, no account needed |
| AI crawler traffic | AI crawler monitoring via Cloudflare and Vercel | Crawler analytics joined to citations, from a Cloudflare Worker, a Vercel log drain, a webhook or a log upload |
| Agent access | Ask Gauge chat agent, Slack, MCP | Buildable agents and agent tables, plus a free MCP server for Claude, Cursor, VS Code or Windsurf |
| Agencies | $300 a month per client, free pitch workspace of 100 prompts | Free report per prospect, portfolios with a shared credit purse |

## What Gauge does well

Gauge is a five-person Y Combinator company (S24) that raised $2.4 million, and it has executed the proof playbook better than almost anyone in the category. Its homepage carries seven named case studies with before and after numbers: LedgerUp from 1% to 17% visibility in four weeks, Braintrust from 2.5% to 45% in seven months, PostHog's LLM-referred traffic up 41 times over 23 months.

The product is dense. Growth tracks 600 prompts a day across six platforms, which Gauge counts as 108,000 AI answers a month and prices at about half a cent per answer. The Action Center ranks four kinds of fix (low mention rate, content gaps, page structure, influential citation opportunities), drafts the content, and publishes it to your CMS after you approve the brief and the final post. Ask Gauge answers questions in plain language across GA4, Search Console and the prompt data, and the same data is reachable from Slack or an MCP client.

If you sell developer tools, Gauge's second product is unusual: it runs real coding sessions in Claude Code, Codex and Cursor and reports which packages the agents install, so you can see whether an agent picks you.

## Where reviewers say Gauge falls short

Third-party reviews are consistent about the trade-offs. Cintra's review says "it monitors; it doesn't execute", that drafts are a "strong first draft but rarely publishable without editing", and that "locking Claude and Grok behind Enterprise is a meaningful limitation." It also notes that "600 prompts disappear fast when you track multiple products across geographies," and that the platform is English only.

The same review names who Gauge is not for: solo founders without execution capacity, teams that need Claude data without enterprise fees, and multi-language brands. Those first two groups are most of the people who write to us.

## What Limelit does

Limelit tracks the same core loop with a different starting price and a different idea of who does the work.

**Tracking.** Every account gets all six engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Visibility is the share of your tracked prompt answers that name you. Share of voice, average position, sentiment and the sources each engine cited sit beside it, and query fan-out shows the sub-questions an engine expanded your prompt into. The definitions are published in Limelit's own words at [limelit.co/llms.txt](https://limelit.co/llms.txt).

**Finding the gap.** Your Pages joins every page you own with the answers that cite it. Top Sources shows which third-party pages the engines trust in your category and whether you are on them. The gap score ranks openings by how often AI pulls a source, how much competitors gain from it, and how absent you are.

**Fixing it.** Drafts are grounded in that evidence and land in an editor with a pre-flight check before publishing. The blog is served on your own domain, as a subpath or a subdomain. Cross Check goes a step further than sentiment: it extracts the factual claims AI answers make about your brand, checks each one against a Knowledge Source you control (your pricing page, your fact sheet), and returns accurate, inaccurate or unsupported with the exact source version pinned. Wrong claims become drafted corrections a person reviews.

**Agents.** Describe the agent you want in a sentence and Limelit assembles it from tested parts: a weekly KPI pulse, a competitor matrix check, a perception pulse, a citation gap sweep, a page readiness audit. Agent tables run those agents over a spreadsheet of rows. Every run shows its credit cost first and nothing publishes without a person. The MCP server is free with any account, so the same evidence is reachable from Claude, Cursor or any MCP client.

**Cost.** There is no subscription and no seat fee. Credits are prepaid and never expire. An AI-readiness scan is free, a prompt refresh is metered from the actual model usage across the engines that prompt has enabled, and a full draft is estimated at roughly 550 credits. A spend cap stops Limelit before it is exceeded.

## The price question, in Gauge's own units

Gauge's argument for $599 is value density: 600 prompts a day is 108,000 tracked answers a month, so the price per answer is small. That is true, and it is the right frame if you will use that volume.

Most lean teams will not. A team tracking 40 buyer questions across six engines does not need 600 prompts refreshed daily, and paying for the capacity anyway is the whole cost. Limelit's model inverts it: you pay for the runs you make, you see the cost before each one, and the first 1,000 credits are free. If you later need daily refreshes across hundreds of prompts, the credit packs scale to that too.

## Which one should you choose?

**Choose Gauge if:**

- You have the budget for $599 a month and want 600 prompts refreshed every day.
- Microsoft Copilot is a surface you need on the entry tier.
- You want 18 drafted articles a month pushed straight into Webflow, Framer, Sanity or GitHub, and have an editor to finish them.
- You want recurring strategy sessions with the vendor, which Gauge offers on Enterprise.
- You sell developer tools and want to measure what coding agents install.

**Choose Limelit if:**

- You want to see your AI visibility this week for free, with no card.
- You need Claude tracking without an enterprise contract.
- You want the platform to verify what AI says about you, not only score its tone.
- You want unlimited seats, so the whole team can look without a per-seat conversation.
- You want to drive the evidence from your own agent through a free MCP server.

Either way, start with the question, not the tool. Run the [free AI search report](https://limelit.co/report): it asks six engines your buyers' questions and emails you who gets named, who gets cited and which sources the engines trust. If the answer is uncomfortable, you now know what to fix.

## FAQ

**Does Gauge have a free plan?**
No. Gauge offers a one-week free trial of its $599 a month Growth plan. The $99 Starter plan that appeared in comparisons earlier in 2026 is no longer listed. Limelit is free to start with 1,000 credits and no card.

**Which engines does each tool track?**
Gauge Growth tracks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, with Claude and Grok on Enterprise. Limelit tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode on every account, and does not track Copilot or Grok.

**Can I use both?**
Yes. Some teams run Gauge's daily prompt volume alongside Limelit's Cross Check and readiness audit. If you are choosing one, the deciding questions are usually budget, whether you need Claude on the entry tier, and whether you want the tool to draft and verify the fix.

**Is Limelit's data comparable to Gauge's?**
Both measure the share of tracked answers that mention a brand. Limelit's definitions, including which runs count in the denominator, are published at limelit.co/llms.txt so you can check them.