How we rebuilt provider routing for better, faster inference
OpenRouter rebuilt its routing so it constantly monitors the performance of every provider endpoint to balance cost, speed and reliability. Previously, most traffic by default went to the cheapest provider for a model.
What the article says
On October 28, 2026, OpenRouter announced a new default provider routing algorithm, which it calls its biggest improvement since it was founded. The old router mostly ranked providers by input token price, so the cheapest provider received most of the traffic.
The new router scores each request on effective price, throughput, reliability, availability and quality (notably whether tool calls are well formed). No change to code, keys or model IDs is needed. In a week-long test covering over 24 million requests, median time to first token fell from 1,007 ms to 837 ms and requests hitting a 429 error dropped from 7.1% to 3.8%, but cost per million tokens rose 7.3%. Users who want price-only routing can set provider.sort, append :floor to the model slug, or change an account setting.
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