Most AEO pitches sound like this: "AI assistants are the new search engine. If you're not optimized for them, you're invisible." That's true. But there's a harder argument that nobody's making yet, and it comes from a benchmark published last month. Reflex compared two approaches to the same automated task. Path A: a vision agent that navigates your website by screenshot. Path B: an API agent that calls your endpoints directly. 550,000 tokens vs. 12,000 tokens. 53 steps vs. 8 calls. 1,000 seconds vs. 19.7 seconds. The cost difference is 45x. And it's structural. Not a model problem, not a configuration problem. Vision agents must render every intermediate state to interpret it. Better models reduce error rates but can't reduce step counts. The gap is baked into the architecture. What This Means for Your Business AI agents are now software workers with token budgets. A token is a unit of cost. Businesses that make their data easy to extract pay 12,000 tokens to serve an agent.…