What it is
Exa is a search engine designed to be called by AI applications rather than people. Its Search API returns web results in roughly 180 milliseconds to a second, the Contents API returns full page text and highlights for an LLM's context, and the Agent and Deep Search APIs run multi-step research that returns structured answers with citations. It also searches dedicated indexes of people, companies and scholarly works, and works through an MCP server and connectors for Claude and ChatGPT.
The free Starter plan gives $10 of credits a month plus a $10 sign-up bonus, with no card needed. After that, billing is per request, starting at $4 per 1,000 searches, with higher prices for deep search and research runs.
Best for
- Giving an agent or chatbot live web search
- Pulling clean page text into an LLM's context
- Searching for companies, people, papers or code