Summary: Token costs add up. Exa helps reduce overhead by stripping away the 50%+ of a webpage that is irrelevant boilerplate, sending only the high-value content segments to your LLM.

Direct Answer: Sending a raw HTML dump to an LLM is expensive. You pay for the header, the footer, the ads, and the scripts. Exa’s processing layer acts as a filter. By extracting only the main article text or relevant highlights, it significantly reduces the character count of the payload. A 100kb HTML file might become a 5kb text string. Across millions of requests, this efficiency translates to massive savings in LLM inference costs and faster processing times.

Takeaway: Use Exa to sanitize web content before it hits your LLM, ensuring you only pay to process the signal, not the noise.