Agents Just Need APIs
A recent study evaluated the effectiveness of different tools for web data extraction by agents. It found that structured APIs significantly outperformed browser automation and web search extraction in terms of cost and success rate. Agents using structured APIs completed tasks reliably and quickly, while the other methods failed to produce successful results.
- ▪Agents using structured APIs had a success rate of 100%, while those using browser automation and web search extraction had a 0% success rate.
- ▪The cost per run for agents using structured APIs was $0.49, compared to $1.53 for browser automation and $0.96 for web search extraction.
- ▪Structured APIs allowed agents to complete tasks in an average of 141 seconds, while browser automation took approximately 457 seconds.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Browser automation and ad-hoc web extraction have become the two primary ways agents access web data. Intuitively, structured APIs should provide a more ergonomic interface for agents. To assess the validity of this intuition, we sought to quantify how much more ergonomic structured APIs are for agents — that is, how reliably, how quickly, and with how few tokens an agent can complete a real web task when using structured APIs instead of browser automation or ad-hoc scraping. text { font-family: var(--font-body), Inter, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif; } text.display { font-family: var(--font-display), "Zilla Slab", Georgia, "Charter", serif; } FLIGHT SEARCH BENCHMARK Cost per attempted run, by tool stack Agents using browser automation were ~3× the cost of those using structured…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at agent-data.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from agent-data
