Exa
AI InfrastructureFreemiumVisit Site
A search API built for AI agents rather than humans — structured outputs, token-efficient highlights, and sub-200ms responses.
Overview
Pointing an agent at a consumer search API is a category error: you get ten blue links optimized for a human to scan, and the agent then fetches and reads full pages, burning tokens on navigation chrome. Exa is designed the other way round. Highlights extract only the relevant excerpt, which the vendor measures at roughly a 90% token reduction; structured outputs return JSON matching a schema you define, so "find me the CEO and founding year of these 200 companies" comes back as data rather than prose to parse. It reports sub-180ms responses and leads on retrieval benchmarks including FRAMES. Named users include Cognition, HubSpot, Cursor, and AWS. Enterprise posture is strong for a developer API — SOC 2 Type II, GDPR/CCPA/HIPAA, and zero data retention.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Roughly 90% token reduction versus fetching full pages
- Structured JSON output against your own schema
- Sub-180ms latency
- Zero data retention plus SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA coverage
- Used in production by Cursor, Cognition, and HubSpot
Cons
- Usage pricing is not on the homepage — model your volume first
- Another metered dependency in the agent loop
- Index coverage differs from Google; verify recall on your domain
- Overkill if you only need occasional lookups
Workflows that use Exa
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