Exa is an AI-powered web search API built specifically for AI agents and applications. Founded as Metaphor Systems, the company rebranded to Exa and raised over $250 million in Series C funding. Exa provides a single API for web search, content crawling, and deep research, offering configurable latency from sub-200 milliseconds for fast queries to multi-step agent workflows for complex research. It is used by AI platforms including Cursor, OpenRouter, HubSpot, Monday.com, Databricks, Cognition, and Groq.
Key Capabilities
- Search API: Returns real-time web search results with AI-generated highlights that extract the most relevant excerpts for LLM context. Supports search verticals including full web, news, companies, research papers, people, and financials. Latency is configurable from 180 milliseconds to 1 second.
- Contents API: Fetches full page text content with customizable highlights. The highlights feature uses a specialized model to extract concise excerpts, reducing token consumption by up to 90 percent. OpenRouter passes up to 25 trillion tokens per month through Exa highlights.
- Deep Search: Multi-step agent workflows that return structured JSON outputs with grounded web citations. Suitable for complex queries requiring synthesis across multiple sources, such as comparing company information or finding specific data points.
- Agent API: Asynchronous deep research runs with structured outputs and citations. Supports fixed-effort pricing modes from low to extra-high to match query complexity. Designed for automated list building, enrichment, and research workflows.
- Monitors: Scheduled searches that track new events and updates across the web at configurable cadences, delivering results via webhooks for automated workflows.
Performance
Exa reports best-in-class accuracy on the FRAMES benchmark at 54.4 percent, outperforming Perplexity at 44.5 percent and Brave at 21.6 percent. It also leads on Tip-of-Tongue and Seal0 benchmarks. The Instant search mode returns results in under 180 milliseconds, designed for latency-sensitive agent loops in coding assistants and chatbots.
Pricing
Exa offers a free tier with 1,000 requests per month. Paid plans start at $7 per 1,000 requests for Search, $12 to $15 per 1,000 requests for Deep Search, $1 per 1,000 pages for Contents, and $15 per 1,000 requests for Monitors. Agent API pricing starts at $0.025 per low-effort request. Enterprise plans include custom pricing, volume discounts, and zero data retention.
Intended Users
Exa is designed for developers building AI-powered applications that require grounded web data. Common use cases include coding agents needing real-time documentation search, chatbots requiring accurate citations, lead enrichment for sales platforms, news monitoring, and voice agents. Customers range from startups to enterprise organizations.
Security
Exa is SOC 2 Type II certified and offers zero data retention options for enterprise customers. Single sign-on is available for team authentication and access management. Startup and education grants provide $1,000 worth of free credits for qualifying organizations.
