@inproceedings{song-etal-2025-beyond,
    title = "Beyond Browsing: {API}-Based Web Agents",
    author = "Song, Yueqi  and
      Xu, Frank F.  and
      Zhou, Shuyan  and
      Neubig, Graham",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.577/",
    pages = "11066--11085",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing.However, there is also another interface designed specifically for machine interaction with online content: application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper we ask {--} *what if we were to take tasks traditionally tackled by Browsing Agents, and give AI agents access to APIs*?To do so, we propose two varieties of agents: (1) an API-calling agent that attempts to perform online tasks through APIs only, similar to traditional coding agents, and (2) a Hybrid Agent that can interact with online data through both web browsing and APIs.In experiments on WebArena, a widely-used and realistic benchmark for web navigation tasks, we find that API-Based Agents outperform web Browsing Agents.Hybrid Agents out-perform both others nearly uniformly across tasks, resulting in a more than 24.0{\%} absolute improvement over web browsing alone, achieving a success rate of 38.9{\%}, the SOTA performance among task-agnostic agents.These results strongly suggest that when APIs are available, they present an attractive alternative to relying on web browsing alone."
}