What Is an AI Gateway? A Guide to Routing, Cost Control, and Governance for LLM and Agent Traffic
Perplexity, Tuesday, October 20th, 2026
Perplexity explains AI gateways, which centralize routing, spend limits, security and monitoring for LLM and agent traffic.
Perplexity describes an AI gateway as an intermediary layer between applications or agents and the models they call, centralizing routing, spending limits, security and monitoring.
Through one interface, teams can reach multiple providers, swap models via configuration, enforce token budgets, redact sensitive data, cache similar prompts and log requests.
The guide contrasts AI gateways with traditional API gateways that meter requests rather than tokens, and with narrower LLM and MCP gateways.
It notes gateways add slight latency and compares self-hosted and managed options.