What is an AI token?

A token is a chunk of text a model reads or writes for billing and processing. It is not the same thing as a word, which is why token-based pricing often feels abstract the first time you see it.

This scaffold page exists to support the calculator and future SEO work. The next content pass should add worked examples, token-count ranges, and links back into provider-specific calculators.

A rough mental shortcut is that English text often lands near four characters per token, though that varies by wording, code blocks, symbols, and language. That is why the token estimator in the calculator is only presented as an approximation.

The useful business angle here is that people searching this question are often upstream of cost estimation, which makes this kind of explainer page a better ad target than the calculator result itself.