--- source_url: "https://agentsindex.ai/exa?utm_source=openai" title: "Exa: Web search API for AI teams that returns relevant" mirrored_at: 2026-08-30T01:03:22.701Z host: agentsindex.ai cited_in_42a: true mirror_canonical: "https://index.42a.ai/agentsindex.ai/exa__q__utm_source_openai" --- > **Original source:** https://agentsindex.ai/exa?utm_source=openai ## At a glance Best for Exa is best for AI teams that need fast, grounded web search inside agents and workflows. Pricing Free; Search $7/1k requests; Contents $1/1k pages per content type; Monitors $15/1k requests; Answer $5/1k requests; Enterprise Custom… API Yes — Exa offers a search API with fast web search, structured outputs, shows, and dedicated indexes for different search verticals. ## What it actually is Exa is a search API, not a search engine you visit — the product is `/search`, `/contents`, `/answer`, `/monitors`, and `/agent` endpoints that a developer calls from code. It runs its own crawl and index (Exa says it tracks over 500 billion URLs) with embedding-based retrieval rather than wrapping Google or Bing SERPs, and returns results pre-trimmed to the passages an LLM actually needs, which is the pitch for token cost. It ships official Python (`exa-py`) and TypeScript SDKs, plus a hosted MCP server (`mcp.exa.ai`) that plugs into Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT/Codex, and a dozen other agent clients without running any local server. Source: [https://exa.ai/pricing](https://exa.ai/pricing?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-py](https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-py?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://exa.ai/docs/reference/exa-mcp](https://exa.ai/docs/reference/exa-mcp?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) ## Pricing — usage-based, no subscription There's no monthly plan: you load credits and pay per call. Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests (covers up to 10 results, with page text and highlights included since a March 2026 pricing simplification), $1 per 1,000 additional results beyond 10, and $1 per 1,000 AI-generated page summaries. `/answer` (a direct LLM answer with citations) is $5 per 1,000 requests. `/contents` (fetching known URLs) is $1 per 1,000 pages per content type. Deep/multi-step search runs $12–15 per 1,000 requests depending on mode. The separate Agent API bills per fixed-effort run ($0.012 to $1.00) or by metered usage (compute units, tool calls, contact-enrichment lookups) with a default $5 cap. New accounts get $20 in free credits (~2,800 searches) plus $10/month ongoing on the free tier. Enterprise tiers (custom indexes, higher rate limits, SLAs, zero data retention) are quote-only. Source: [https://exa.ai/pricing](https://exa.ai/pricing?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) (verified 2026-08-27) ## How it compares on cost to the obvious alternatives Independent analysis (Sacra, January 2026) puts Exa's per-1k-search rate at $5–7 against SerpAPI-style Google/Bing SERP wrappers charging roughly $25 per 1,000 searches — a meaningfully different pricing model because Exa isn't reselling someone else's index. The trade-off: Exa's own index and ranking, unlike a SERP wrapper, means result quality is entirely Exa's engineering, not Google's. Source: [https://sacra.com/research/exa-at-10m-growing-11x-yoy/](https://sacra.com/research/exa-at-10m-growing-11x-yoy?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) ## Accuracy claims — vendor-run benchmarks, credible underlying tests Exa publishes head-to-head accuracy tables against Perplexity, Brave, Tavily, and Parallel on FRAMES, Tip-of-Tongue, and Seal0 — established retrieval benchmarks (FRAMES is a published Google DeepMind benchmark, arXiv:2409.12941) — claiming 54.4% vs Perplexity's 44.5% and Brave's 21.6% on FRAMES, and 178ms p50 latency for its fastest tier against 260–3,051ms for competitors. These are real, named benchmarks, but the comparison numbers are Exa's own test runs, not scored by an independent leaderboard — we could not find a neutral third party reproducing these exact figures. Treat the benchmark names as legitimate and the specific scores as a vendor claim until corroborated. Source: [https://exa.ai/](https://exa.ai/?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) (homepage benchmark tables, verified 2026-08-27), [https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12941](https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12941?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) ## Customers and scale Exa says it's used by over 500,000 developers and 5,000+ companies (its own figures, from the May 2026 Series C announcement). Named, verifiable customers with published case studies include Cursor, Cognition (Devin), HubSpot, Firefox, monday.com, OpenRouter, and CodeRabbit — these are on Exa's customer-story pages with attributed named quotes (e.g., HubSpot's AI Lead, Cognition's co-founder), which is a stronger form of evidence than a logo wall but is still vendor-published. Independent research firm Sacra estimated Exa's annualized revenue at $10M in September 2025, up from roughly $880K a year earlier — implying a roughly 70x revenue multiple at its Series B valuation. Sources: [https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-c](https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-c?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://exa.ai/customers](https://exa.ai/customers?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://sacra.com/research/exa-at-10m-growing-11x-yoy/](https://sacra.com/research/exa-at-10m-growing-11x-yoy?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) ## Funding and company stability Exa (Exa Labs) has raised in three public rounds: a $17M round reported by TechCrunch in July 2024 (participants included Lightspeed and Y Combinator), an $85M Series B led by Benchmark in September 2025 at a $700M valuation, and a $250M Series C led by a16z in May 2026 at a $2.2B valuation — all confirmed via Exa's own funding announcements and corroborated for the earlier round by TechCrunch. Total disclosed funding is roughly $352M. The company was founded in 2021 (per its own account) and has been operating and shipping monthly product updates continuously through August 2026. Sources: [https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-c](https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-c?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-b](https://exa.ai/blog/announcing-series-b?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/exa-raises-17m-lightspeed-nvidia-ycombinator-google-ai-models/](https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/exa-raises-17m-lightspeed-nvidia-ycombinator-google-ai-models?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) ## Security and compliance Exa publishes a SOC 2 Type II attestation, a public vulnerability disclosure policy with a paid bug bounty ($25–$5,000 by severity) at exa.ai/security, and a Vanta-hosted trust center listing GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA (BAA available) support. Zero data retention is available but gated behind an Enterprise plan and a sales conversation rather than a self-serve toggle — the pricing page and enterprise FAQ both confirm this is quote-only. Source: [https://exa.ai/security](https://exa.ai/security?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://exa.ai/enterprise](https://exa.ai/enterprise?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://trust.exa.ai](https://trust.exa.ai/?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) ## Open source footprint is thin — this is a hosted API, not an open product The Exa product itself (crawler, index, ranking models) is closed and only accessible via the paid API. What's open source are client libraries: `exa-py` (229 GitHub stars, MIT license, actively maintained with releases through the SDK's changelog) and `exa-mcp-server` (4,926 stars, MIT license, the more actively developed and popular of the two). Neither is the product — they're thin wrappers around the hosted API and offer no path to running Exa's search independent of Exa's servers. Sources: [https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-py](https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-py?utm_source=agentsindex.ai), [https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-mcp-server](https://github.com/exa-labs/exa-mcp-server?utm_source=agentsindex.ai) (verified 2026-08-27) ## How much does Exa cost? Plan Price What's included Free Free - Start searching for free Search $7/1k requests - Search - Web search tool calls for agents - Webpage text and shows - Configurable latency: 180ms to 1s Deep Search $12–15/1k requests - Research with structured outputs optimized for complex queries - Multi-step agent workflows - Answers with structured outputs - Web grounded citations Contents $1/1k pages per content type - Full page contents for LLM context - Token efficient shows - Configurable livecrawl policies Monitors $15/1k requests - Track new events and updates across the web - Identify fresh events on the web - Runs searches at a specified cadence - Receive updates with webhooks Answer $5/1k requests - Low latency answers - Web grounded citations - Streaming responses Enterprise Custom - Enterprise - Search - Requests with more than 25 results - Custom rate limits (QPS) - Tailored moderation - Custom index - Support - SLAs and MSAs - 1:1 onboarding and support - Zero Data Retention - Custom Pricing - Volume discounts - Standard billing Startup and Education Grants Free - $1000 worth of free credits - Build, launch and test search - Contact Us ## Frequently asked questions ### What is Exa? Exa is a web search API for AI teams that returns clean, relevant context for agents and workflows. It includes Fast, Deep Search, AI Answer, Structured Output, and Full Web, plus Monitors and Zero Data Retention for enterprise use. Customers include Cursor, Databricks, and HubSpot, and it integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Zapier, and Google Sheets. Plans run Free, Search $7/1k requests, Contents $1/1k pages per content type, Monitors $15/1k requests, Answer $5/1k requests, and Enterprise custom. ### How much does Exa cost? Is it free? Exa has a free plan, with paid tiers including Search at $7/1k requests, Deep Search at $12, 15/1k requests, Contents at $1/1k pages per content type. ### What is Exa used for? Who is it for? Exa is used for Fast, Deep, and Full Web. It's built for AI product teams, Developers building coding assistants, and Research teams. ### Does Exa have an API and what does it integrate with? Exa offers a search API with fast web search, structured outputs, shows, and dedicated indexes for different search verticals. It integrates with HubSpot, OpenAI, Zapier, n8n, Make, and 25 more. Editor's read Check whether your workload needs Enterprise if you require zero data retention, custom indexes, or custom rate limits. Those controls are listed on the Enterprise tier, while the usage plans are priced per request or per page.