Exa

AI-powered web search API built for LLMs and agents. Returns high-quality search results with neural and keyword matching, plus on-demand content retrieval (full text, highlights, and summaries) in a single request.

Capabilities

Authentication

• Type: API Key
• Header: x-api-key: {key}
• Get key: https://dashboard.exa.ai

Endpoints

Base URL: https://api.exa.ai

Common Agent Operations

Web Search with Content

POST https://api.exa.ai/search
{
  "query": "best B2B SaaS onboarding flows",
  "type": "auto",
  "numResults": 10,
  "contents": {
    "text": { "maxCharacters": 1000 },
    "highlights": true
  }
}

Competitor Content Discovery

POST https://api.exa.ai/search
{
  "query": "landing page teardowns",
  "includeDomains": ["goodui.org", "growth.design", "marketingexamples.com"],
  "startPublishedDate": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "contents": { "highlights": true }
}

Find Similar Pages

POST https://api.exa.ai/findSimilar
{
  "url": "https://stripe.com/pricing",
  "numResults": 20,
  "contents": { "summary": { "query": "What pricing model and price points does this page use?" } }
}

Category-Filtered Search

POST https://api.exa.ai/search
{
  "query": "DTC beauty brand raising Series A",
  "category": "news",
  "numResults": 25,
  "startPublishedDate": "2024-06-01T00:00:00Z"
}

Fetch Contents for Known URLs

POST https://api.exa.ai/contents
{
  "urls": ["https://example.com/post-1", "https://example.com/post-2"],
  "text": true,
  "summary": { "query": "Summarize this article's key argument in one paragraph." }
}

Key Parameters

Search Types

• auto - Automatically routes between neural and keyword matching (default)
• neural - Embedding-based semantic search; best for concept/idea queries
• fast - Lower-latency neural search
• instant - Returns cached results near-instantly
• deep-lite, deep, deep-reasoning - Agentic search variants that plan multiple queries and synthesize

Categories

company, research paper, news, personal site, financial report, people

Filtering

• includeDomains / excludeDomains - Restrict to or exclude specific domains (up to 1200)
• includeText / excludeText - Require or forbid phrases in result pages
• startPublishedDate / endPublishedDate - ISO 8601 publication date range
• startCrawlDate / endCrawlDate - ISO 8601 crawl date range
• userLocation - Two-letter country code (e.g., US)

Contents (Mix and Match)

All three can be requested in the same call:

• text: true or { maxCharacters, includeHtmlTags, verbosity } - Full or truncated page text
• highlights: true or { query, maxCharacters } - LLM-selected relevant snippets
• summary: { query, schema } - LLM-generated summary, optionally conforming to a JSON schema

When to Use

• Content research - Find high-quality long-form content on niche topics by meaning, not just keywords
• Competitor discovery - Find companies similar to one you've identified via findSimilar
• SEO content gap analysis - Search for topics your competitors rank for and pull highlights for quick review
• Customer research - Find forum threads, blog posts, and reviews about your product or category
• Audience research - Discover blogs, newsletters, and communities where your ICP publishes or comments
• News monitoring - Track mentions of your brand, competitors, or category with date-filtered news search
• Link prospecting - Find authoritative pages covering topics you write about, for outreach
• Lead research - Use the company and people categories to discover accounts or individuals matching criteria

Rate Limits

• Varies by plan; see https://exa.ai/pricing
• Most production plans support hundreds of concurrent requests
• Content retrieval (text/highlights/summary) is billed separately from the base search

Relevant Skills

• seo-audit
• ai-seo
• content-strategy
• competitor-profiling
• competitor-alternatives
• customer-research
• cold-email
• lead-magnets
• marketing-ideas