OpenRouter ranking manipulation is a very smart move by LLM companies—it costs very little but has great promotional effects. Take MiniMax dominating the charts, for example. The biggest consumption is on Kilo Code, and MiniMax is free on Kilo Code. Most people probably don’t even know what that is. OpenRouter doesn’t have a large total volume, but by offering free quotas to a few aggregator channels, it can easily climb the rankings. Whether it’s selling models or stocks, the advertising effect is solid. Don’t think I’m FUDing here. If the LLM company you’re invested in isn’t using such a great promotional strategy, that’s just foolish. As long as they sell to the people who figure it out last, it’s all good (or maybe they don’t even need to, since the model’s performance is actually pretty decent ).