Share
What is Exa?
Exa is an AI tool (by Exa Labs Inc.) that provides a web search API for AI agents, built to give models the context they need in real time. Exa trains its own embedding and retrieval models, crawls billions of documents a day and runs its own vector database. The company says more than 500,000 developers build AI products on top of it.
What does the Exa web search API for AI agents include?
- Search: agent search calls with page text and highlights, with configurable latency from 450 ms to 1 s.
- Contents: full page contents ready for LLM context.
- Agent: asynchronous deep research runs with structured outputs and citations.
- Monitors: scheduled searches that push fresh events via webhooks.
- Lite, Auto and Deep modes depending on speed or depth.
Which data indexes does Exa offer?
Beyond the public web index, Exa has people, company and scholarly works indexes. It can enrich lists with structured outputs across 70M+ companies and, on Enterprise, build custom indexes or bring your own data providers.
What are the main Exa use cases?
Teams use Exa in coding agents that query docs and GitHub repos, chatbots that need current information, news monitoring, data enrichment, voice agents and people or company search for sales. Highlights extract only the relevant excerpts to save tokens.
How does Exa integrate and how secure is it?
It integrates via API, an MCP server, a Claude connector, a ChatGPT plugin and 50+ integrations. Exa states SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliance with a BAA available, and says queries and results are never stored or trained on.
Exa pros and cons
- Pro: own index and retrieval models
- Pro: token-efficient excerpts in results
- Pro: people and company indexes besides the web
- Con: built for developers rather than end users
- Con: spend grows with query volume
Exa features and use cases
How to use Exa
Exa FAQ
What is Exa?
Exa is a web search API built so AI agents and LLMs can retrieve current information from the internet.
Is Exa free?
There is a free tier with monthly credits, then you pay per use. See the pricing section of this page.
Does Exa support Spanish queries?
Its site and docs are in English and do not detail language support; you can test Spanish queries with the free credits.
Does Exa have an API?
Yes, Exa is an API with search, contents, research and monitor endpoints, plus an MCP server.
Can I use Exa with Claude or ChatGPT?
Yes, it offers a Claude connector, a ChatGPT plugin and an MCP server.
What is Exa Agent?
An asynchronous deep research endpoint that returns structured outputs with citations.
Can Exa search for people and companies?
Yes, it has people and company indexes in addition to its web and scholarly indexes.
Does Exa store my queries?
Exa says queries and results are never stored or used to train models.
What are Exa Monitors?
They run searches on the schedule you choose and send fresh results via webhook.
What are the best Exa alternatives?
On GptZone you can compare it with AI search tools such as Tavily and Perplexity.
Exa pricing and plans
Reference price: 4 USD · usage based. Source · Verified: November 1, 2026
Pay-as-you-go pricing in US dollars (USD). Checked on: 01/11/2026.
Starter: free; $10 in credits per month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, no payment method, all endpoints and 10 queries per second.
Developer: pay as you go with no commitment; up to 25 search QPS and email support.
Enterprise: custom; zero data retention, HIPAA, SSO and SCIM, SLAs and a dedicated Slack channel.
Products: Search from $4 per 1k requests; Agent $0.012–$1.00 per run; Contents $1 per 1k pages per content type; Monitors $15 per 1k requests.
Exa Screenshots
Exa user reviews
Write a review
Checking your session...
Exa Reviews
Loading reviews...
Exa alternatives
LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex is a document AI platform that turns complex PDFs, tables and charts into structured, LLM-ready data for RAG and document agents.
