Exa

What is Exa?

Exa is a search engine designed to be called by other AI systems rather than browsed directly by people, returning clean, structured, semantically relevant results that are easy for an LLM to consume as part of a RAG pipeline or agent.

Key features

• Semantic search API tuned for AI application use
• Clean, structured results without ads or SEO noise
• Website and content-type filters for precise retrieval
• Answer endpoint for direct question answering over search results
• Built for integration into RAG pipelines and AI agents

How to get started

1. Sign up at exa.ai and get an API key
2. Call the search or answer endpoint with your query
3. Filter results by domain, date, or content type as needed
4. Feed results into your RAG pipeline or agent's context

Use cases

• Building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines
• Giving an AI agent reliable web search capability
• Research tools that need clean, structured search results
• Reducing noise compared to scraping traditional search results

Exa vs. alternatives

FAQ

Is Exa free to use?

Exa's plans: Free tier, usage-based API pricing. Pricing and free-tier limits change over time, so check the official site above for the latest details.

What is Exa used for?

Search API built specifically for AI applications.

Who is Exa best for?

Exa is a good fit for building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, or giving an AI agent reliable web search capability.

What are the alternatives to Exa?

Commonly compared alternatives include Perplexity and OpenRouter, see the comparison above for how they differ.