Agent Token Budget

An agent developer sets a 2000-token budget for search context per session. Each Scavio search returns ~150 tokens of structured results (5 results, title + snippet). The agent makes 8 searches using 1200 tokens, well within budget. Without the budget, the same 8 searches using raw web fetch would have consumed 12,000 tokens.

Agent Token Budget is relevant to Google, Reddit. Scavio provides a unified API to access data from all of these platforms.

Without token budgets, a single search API call can inject 2000-5000 tokens of results into an agent's context. An agent making 5 searches per session might consume 10,000-25,000 tokens on search results alone, leaving less context for reasoning, code generation, and conversation history. Token budgets work at two levels: per-call budgets that truncate individual search results (e.g., max 300 tokens per search, keeping only title + snippet + URL for top 5 results) and session budgets that limit total search token consumption. Structured search APIs like Scavio return compact JSON (title, snippet, URL) that is inherently more token-efficient than raw HTML or full-page extraction. A typical Scavio result for 10 organic results uses 600-800 tokens versus 4000-8000 tokens for equivalent raw web content. Implementing budgets: count tokens in search results using tiktoken (Python) or approximation (chars/4), truncate at the budget threshold, and track cumulative usage per session.