Search APIs for AI Agents · Reviewed 27 Oct 2026

Exa

Search API for AI agents needing real-time web data and deep research.

free tier · exa.ai ↗

Paid against free › Search APIs for AI Agents › Exa

Exa at a glance

Overview

01

Summary

The useful answer before the supporting detail.

Exa is a search engine and API designed for developers and AI applications, providing real-time web data and deep research capabilities S1. It is used by engineers, researchers, and operators to build AI-powered search and agentic systems, solving the problem of accessing fresh, relevant web information for LLMs S1. The main practical value is its high-quality search API that powers applications for companies like Cursor and HubSpot, with over 400,000 developers S1.

02

Product identity and positioning

Name, category, positioning, audience, and first-party claims.

  • Identity: Exa is a search engine and API for developers and AI applications S1.
  • Core purpose: Provides real-time web data and deep research to AI agents, solving the problem of accessing fresh, relevant information S129.
  • Intended users: Developers, researchers, and operators building AI-powered search and agentic systems S1.
  • Product scope: A search API with endpoints for search, contents, and agent runs, not a full platform S49.
  • Positioning: Positioned as the highest quality search API at every latency S1.
  • Claimed distinction: Claims to be the highest quality search API, with web-scale infrastructure for 500B+ webpages S1.
03

Use cases and audiences

Who the product serves and the jobs it is designed to handle.

AudiencePractical use case
AI developersIntegrate real-time web search into AI agents and LLM applications S1.
ResearchersConduct deep research across the live web with multi-step searches and synthesis S14.
Sales and GTM teamsEnrich CRM data and build targeted lists for lead generation S19.
Compliance teamsIdentify key decision makers and recent signals for compliance solutions S14.

Features

09

Features and capabilities

Core functions and evidence-backed product capabilities.

CapabilityWhat it does
Real-time searchProvides real-time, grounded data with token-efficient page contents for AI agents S49.
Deep researchRuns async agents for deep research, list building, and enrichment S49.
Structured outputReturns results in the exact format you request, including structured data S14.
Entity enrichmentEnriches entities and builds large lists from a single API S19.
Web-scale indexingTracks, indexes, crawls, and monitors billions of webpages at high throughput S1.
Token-efficient highlightsUses a highlights model that reduces token usage by up to 94% S19.
10

Integrations and ecosystem

Connected products, exports, APIs, and workflow compatibility.

Integration or interfaceTypeWhat it enables
OpenAI APIIntegrationAllows using Exa search results within OpenAI chat completions S49.
Exa MCPAI interfaceProvides a Model Context Protocol server for AI agents to access Exa search S49.
API PlaygroundWeb appEnables trying Exa search and agent APIs interactively S129.
Exa ConnectData portabilityConnects to external data providers like Fiber.ai and Baselayer for additional data S61.

Pricing

11

Pricing and plans

Published plans, free access, trials, credits, and pricing limitations.

Plan or offerVerified price and billingIncludedLimits
Starter$0, monthly credits S54$10 in credits every month, plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus S5410 QPS, 50 active runs S54
Pay as you goFrom $4 / 1k requests, usage-based S54Deep Search $12 / 1k; Agent $0.012–$1.00 per run S54Up to 25 search QPS, SOC 2 Type II S54
EnterpriseContact sales, custom S54Custom volume pricing, optional postpaid invoicing S54Custom rate limits and concurrency S54

Competition

12

Competitive landscape

Domains competing for the same organic search demand.

Sampled competitors

CompetitorFirst-page appearancesSampled queriesAverage positionQueries observed
mapquest.com615.219951 mariner ave torrance ca 90503
clipboard.health212.5clipboard address and phone number
local.yahoo.com11219951 mariner ave torrance ca 90503
clipboard.com112clipboard address and phone number
hcp.clipboard.health113clipboard address and phone number
yellowpages.com11419951 mariner ave torrance ca 90503
facebook.com115clipboard address and phone number
clipboard.app116clipboard address and phone number
vendorsforhealthcare.com117clipboard address and phone number
loopnet.com11819951 mariner ave torrance ca 90503

Website intelligence — Collected evidence

Customers, testimonials, and first-party review claims

No supporting public-page evidence was collected for this category.

Independent review sources discovered

No links to supported independent review platforms were discovered on the collected pages.

13

AI visibility

Measured ChatGPT and Google AI mentions with cited sources.

AI-assistant referral traffic

  • Estimated current generative-AI referral share: 8.6%
MonthSource
—All AI assistants
—All AI assistants
—All AI assistants

Website intelligence — Collected evidence

Site-stated AI capabilities

Page typeEvidenceSource
integrationsSearch API for AI agents that need real-time web data, deep research, and structured content from one endpoint. Try our API for free.https://exa.ai/
features> Fetch the Exa site index at: https://exa.ai/llms.txthttps://exa.ai/library/product
features](https://exa.ai/docs/contents/quickstart)[https://exa.ai/library/product
features](https://exa.ai/docs/monitors/quickstart)[https://exa.ai/library/product
featuresAI Assistantshttps://exa.ai/library/product
features](/use-cases/ai-assistants)[https://exa.ai/library/product
featuresDocshttps://exa.ai/library/product
pricingContact salesSign uphttps://exa.ai/pricing
pricingStart building for freehttps://exa.ai/pricing
pricingTry Search for Freehttps://exa.ai/pricing
pricing\$1 \
pricingView pricinghttps://exa.ai/pricing
pricing](https://dashboard.exa.ai/billing?utm_source=docs&utm_medium=docs&utm_campaign=admin_billing)https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricingThe Free tier does not include Exa Snapshot. Add a card and buy credits on the Billing dashboard to move to a pay-as-you-go plan.https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricingRequests are charged against prepaid credits at the rates in Pricing or under your Enterprise contract. Team owners can add credits from the Billing dashboard; payments are processed through Stripe. If your team exhausts its credits, requests return `402 Payment Required`. An API key that reaches its assigned budget also returns `402`. Add credits or ask a team administrator to adjust the key’s budget. See Error codes.https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricingAdd $1,000 in credits within any 30-day window and your team’s rate limit rises to 25 QPS for 90 days, automatically. The threshold counts credits you purchase, not credits you spend, and requalifying resets the 90 days. Track your progress on the Billing dashboard. Need more than 25 QPS? Talk to sales.https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricingAuto recharge purchases credits when your balance reaches a threshold you choose. Configure it from the Billing dashboard.https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricingExa emails receipts for credit purchases and auto recharges from billing@exa.ai. Add the address to your allow list if needed. Your full invoice history is available in the Billing dashboard. Postpaid invoice billing is available with an Enterprise plan.https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricing](mailto:billing@exa.ai)https://exa.ai/docs/admin/billing
pricingStart for free. The Free Tier gives you $10 in credits (up to 2,500 Lite searches) the day you sign up, and your free balance resets to $10 on the first of every month. No payment method required. Complete onboarding in the dashboard and your first team earns a one-time $10 bonus. Get an API key and start building.Scaling up? For high volume, custom indexes, higher rate limits, SLAs, or Zero Data Retention, talk to us about an [Enterprise plan](#enterprise) with volume discounts.https://exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing#credits

These are first-party product claims, not independent measurements of AI-search visibility.

14

Marketing opportunities

Actions calculated directly from the collected evidence.

OpportunityRecommended actionEvidence
Competitor gap6 first-page appearances across 19951 mariner ave torrance ca 90503

Website intelligence — Collected evidence

Website evidence gaps

  • customers: no usable public page was collected; verify whether the site publishes this evidence.
  • reviews: no usable public page was collected; verify whether the site publishes this evidence.
  • changes: no usable public page was collected; verify whether the site publishes this evidence.
  • identity: no usable public page was collected; verify whether the site publishes this evidence.
  • technical: no usable public page was collected; verify whether the site publishes this evidence.

Trust and proof

15

Customers, proof, and reviews

Published proof, customer signals, and review evidence.

Independent reviews

No citation-grounded independent review links were found.

Customer proof

Proof typeNamed customer or sourceEvidence
Case studyCodeRabbitcustomer case study — CodeRabbit × Exa Case Study ... (CodeRabbit × Exa Case Study)
Case studyHubSpotcustomer case study — # HubSpot uses Exa to connect Breeze Assistant and Agents to live web intelligence across CRM workflows 40% Improved latency Real-time News monitoring Company HubSpot ... (HubSpot × Exa Case Study)
Case studyFirefoxcustomer case study — Exa powers Smart Window on Firefox desktop and Quick Answers on Firefox for iOS. (Firefox x Exa Case Study)
Case studyStackAIcustomer case study — 2 weeks Integration to full deployment 10x Research capability improvement 24/7 Real-time intelligence access ... (StackAI × Exa Case Study)
Case study11xcustomer case study — .2M+ Search requests to date 2.7M+ Webset items created to date ... (How 11x finds novel GTM signals with Exa)
TestimonialBernard Aceitunotestimonial — ###### "In our internal benchmarks, Exa delivered accurate source data roughly 30% more often than any other tool we tried, especially on fresh articles. (Customer Stories / How top teams amplify their products with web search / Exa)

Independent mentions

  • How AI synthesis gives 400+ models agentic web search with Exa — Exa and AI synthesis first worked together, the goal was simple: bring live web data to models that did not have ... became the search engine behind that launch. Last year, AI synthesis had powered ... .36M+ search queries with Exa. Today, that number is
  • Exa — The world's data for AI agents — Exa 3.0 leads on BrowseComp, DSQA, and WideSearch, the standard benchmarks for search agents. ... / Benchmark (accuracy %) / Exa 3.0 / Perplexity / Brave / Parallel / / --- / --- / --- / --- / --- / / BrowseComp / 91.8 / 91.5 / 83.5 / 72.7 / / DSQA / 88.2 / 87.6 / 78.6 / 85.3 / / WideSearch / 56.1 / 54.0 / 54.8 / 55.4 / ... / Benchmark (accuracy %) / Exa 3.0 / Perplexity / Brave / Parallel / / --- / --- / --- / --- / --- / / WebCode / 85.5 / 73.9 / 69.4 / 76.3 / / FinSearchComp / 71.4 / 63.4 / 5
  • Our AI Research: How We Evaluate Semantic Search Technology / Exa Blog — At Exa, we've built our own search engine from the ground up. We developed a distributed crawling/parsing system, trained custom embedding and reranking models, designed a new vector database -- all in order to build the best search engine to serve AI applications. When we evaluate Exa search on a variety of benchmarks, we consistently perform state of the art compared to other search APIs. Using Exa retrieval in your application should improve performance on downstream tasks. ... We can evaluat

External links were grounded in one live web search. Search snippets are leads, not independently scraped page content; rejected links remain available in Review evidence.

16

Company, security, and trust

Ownership, policies, security signals, and public trust evidence.

SignalFindingSource
Company and ownershipairplanes , rotorcraft , rockets , satellites , and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support services. Boeing is among the largest global aerospace manufacturers ; it is the fourth-largessource
Contact and supportPhone contact enrichment$0.07 / phone numbersource
Legal and privacyGDPR. EU data-subject rights honored, with lawful-basis handling for personal data.source
Security and complianceSOC 2 Type II. Independently audited controls for security, availability, and confidentiality.source
Uptime and status pageNot published on the collected pages.—
Domain registered2017-12-16—
Domain expires2036-01-27—

Not found on the collected pages: uptime and status page. This only means Scout did not find it on the pages it read; it says nothing about the company itself.

17

Documentation and product updates

Help resources, product guidance, and visible changes over time.

Resource or updateTypeWhat is availableDate or freshness
Start building with Exa - ExaDocumentationA powerful web search tool designed for agents. Everything optimized to get you token-efficient, accurate results. (source)Not dated
Billing and Rate Limits - ExaDocumentationManage Exa credits, invoices, and API rate limits. (source)Not dated
Pricing - ExaDocumentationPay-as-you-go rates for Exa Search, Contents, Answer, Monitors, and the Agent API (source)Not dated
Exa: The Search Engine for Developers & Custom AI Search SolutionProduct updateProduct update is publicly available. (source)Not dated

Not found in the collected public sources: public roadmap, changelog or release notes, status page, separate help center or knowledge base.

Technical

18

Technical and delivery signals

Delivery model, platforms, API, data ownership, reliability claims and release activity.

SignalFindingSource
Delivery model (cloud, self-hosted, desktop, browser extension)Exa is a cloud-based API service S129.S129
Platforms and appsAccessible via web API and API playground S129.S129
API and extensibility (API, SDK, webhooks, MCP, plugins)Provides a search API, agent API, and MCP server S49.S49
Data ownership and exportExa states zero data retention S129.S129
Performance and reliability claimsClaims to serve billions of webpages at high throughput S1.S1
Release activityNot published on the collected pages.—
19

Measured infrastructure

Domain, certificate, and hosting signals, measured directly.

SignalFinding
Domain registered2017-12-16 — Cloudflare, Inc
Domain expires2036-01-27
First archived2016-02-04 — web archive
TLS certificateLet's Encrypt, valid, expires 2027-01-17
Security headersHSTS, CSP, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy
Server headerVercel
Mail handled byaspmx.l.google.com, alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
Nameserverscleo.ns.cloudflare.com, shaz.ns.cloudflare.com
20

Technical site audit

A bounded multi-page crawl with page-level issues and URLs.

Scout — Bounded technical crawl

  • Pages crawled: 15 of 15 maximum
  • Technical health: 98/100
  • Critical issues: 0
  • Warnings: 3
  • Notices: 4

Issues

SeverityIssueValueAffected URL
noticeImages are missing alt text1https://exa.ai/docs/contents/quickstart
noticeImages are missing alt text1https://exa.ai/docs/monitors/quickstart
warningTitle length should be reviewed7https://exa.ai/careers
noticeMeta description length should be reviewed28https://exa.ai/careers
warningTitle length should be reviewed77https://exa.ai/customers
noticeMeta description length should be reviewed191https://exa.ai/about
warningTitle length should be reviewed78https://exa.ai/contact

Crawled pages

StatusTitleH1sWordsResponseURL
200Exa \Search API for AI Agents — Real-Time Web Data192386 ms
200Introducing Exa 3.0 \Exa Blog175753 ms
200AI Web Search for Agents — Exa Search API1956133 mshttps://exa.ai/products/search
200Contents API - Exa11571110 mshttps://exa.ai/docs/contents/quickstart
200Exa Agent API \Exa187349 ms
200Monitors API - Exa11709128 mshttps://exa.ai/docs/monitors/quickstart
200Library: Places, People, Companies, Papers and More \Exa1833111 ms
200Connect — Exa1129197 mshttps://exa.ai/connect
200Careers1789146 mshttps://exa.ai/careers
200Customer Stories \How top teams amplify their products with web search \Exa1778
200Webinars \Learn with Exa1228111 ms
200Partner with Exa — Accelerate Your Growth176144 mshttps://exa.ai/partners
200LLM + Web Search API Demos and Tutorials \Exa1378142 ms
200Exa: The Search Engine for Developers & Custom AI Search Solution1320438 mshttps://exa.ai/about
200Contact Exa AI: Your Enterprise AI Web Search Engine \Support, Sales, & Press130780 ms

This is a bounded Scout crawl. Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse scores are not claimed unless a dedicated performance audit is connected.

21

Search Console and Analytics

First-party search and behavioral data connection state.

Modeled acquisition channels

ChannelEstimated share
direct51.6%
search28.5%
search organic26.5%
search paid2.0%
social4.4%
social organic4.4%
social paid0.0%
referrals5.6%
paid referrals0.3%
mail1.0%
gen ai8.6%
affiliate0.0%
other0.0%

First-party connections

IntegrationStatusData available after connection
Google Search ConsoleNot connectedClicks, impressions, CTR, average position, queries, pages, countries, and devices
Google AnalyticsNot connectedOrganic sessions, engagement, landing pages, conversions, geography, and devices

No first-party Search Console or Analytics numbers are shown until the site owner authorizes the corresponding Google account. Scout traffic model values above are modeled estimates, not private analytics totals.

Limits and method

22

Limitations and open questions

Known constraints and missing evidence from the collected pages.

The collected pages do not mention any competitors by name. Evidence gaps include lack of detailed customer reviews, specific uptime statistics, and release dates for documentation. Open questions remain about the exact scope of the Enterprise plan's custom features and the full list of integrations.

23

Sources, method, and limitations

Evidence inventory, collection method, provider use, and constraints.

This report is based on 15 collected pages from exa.ai, including the homepage, about page, product pages for Deep Research and Agent API, and documentation on pricing and billing. The evidence catalog includes 15 static pages and 8 rendered pages via browser rendering. External proof search was enabled but no verification requests were made. Limitations include potential missing information from pages not collected and the absence of third-party reviews.

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