Does GSC PAP use fewer tokens than calling the Search Console API directly?

Yes, about a third fewer. We measured it on 1,000 real rows from three different properties, serialising the same rows two ways: the shape the Search Console API returns, and the compact format our server sends. The raw API response came to 34,044, 34,535 and 36,237 tokens. The same data from GSC PAP came to 22,933, 23,260 and 23,975. That is 33 to 34% fewer tokens for identical numbers, measured with tiktoken cl100k_base.

The saving is smaller than a byte count suggests, and the difference is worth knowing if you are comparing MCP servers. The same payload shrinks 57% in bytes but only 34% in tokens, because JSON's punctuation is nearly free to tokenise while the text inside it costs the same either way. Any comparison quoting a percentage off the response size is overstating what you get back in context. We had this wrong on our own admin dashboard, measured against a pretty-printed baseline, and it showed roughly double the real benefit until we remeasured.

Where it matters is the responses big enough to crowd out the conversation itself. At a thousand rows the raw shape costs around 36,000 tokens and ours around 24,000, so a 200,000-token context holds five of those responses instead of eight. The format is a per-tool operator setting rather than something you configure: we default to the shape every client understands, and switch individual tools to a compact one once it has been measured on production traffic.