Definition
What this term means
The fundamental unit of text that AI models process, roughly equivalent to three-quarters of a word in English. AI systems break all input text into tokens before processing it. Every word, punctuation mark, and space is tokenised. The number of tokens determines how much content fits within a model's context window and how much it costs to process.
Why it matters
The business impact
Token limits affect how much of your content an AI system can consider and process in a single query. Content that is unnecessarily verbose uses more tokens without adding value, potentially causing key information to be truncated or excluded. Writing token-efficient content, concise, clear, and information-dense, increases the likelihood that AI systems will fully process and cite your most important claims.
Used in context
How you might use this term
“During a content optimisation audit, a team discovered that their 3,000-word guide used 4,200 tokens, most of which were repetitive filler. After streamlining to 1,800 words (2,400 tokens) without losing any substantive information, the page's AI citation rate doubled.”