Added on Nov 14,2026

Exa is a search API built for AI agents that need real-time web data, deep research and structured content from a single endpoint. It is used by more than 900,000 developers building AI products on top of web information.
The Search API returns web search results for agent tool calls, with page text and highlights and configurable latency from about 300 milliseconds to one second. Exa trains its own embedding and retrieval models and crawls billions of documents per day to keep its index current.
Key features include token-efficient highlights produced by a model trained to extract the most relevant excerpts, full page contents for LLM context, configurable live crawling, an asynchronous Agent endpoint for deep research with structured outputs and citations, and Monitors that run searches on a set schedule and send updates by webhook.
Data sources include a web index, a people index, a company index covering more than 70 million companies, and a scholarly works index. Common use cases listed on the site are coding agents, chatbots, news monitoring, enrichments, voice agents, people search and company search.
Exa offers an MCP server, a Claude connector, a ChatGPT plugin and more than 50 integrations. On the security side it lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR with EU data residency, CCPA, HIPAA with a BAA, and zero data retention options.
Pricing: the free Starter plan includes 10 USD of credits every month plus a 10 USD onboarding bonus, with no payment method required. The Developer plan is pay as you go, with Search from 4 USD per 1,000 requests, Contents at 1 USD per 1,000 pages, Monitors at 2 USD per 1,000 requests and Agent runs from 0.012 to 1 USD each. Enterprise plans are custom, and zero data retention needs a 12,000 USD annual commitment.
Exa is suited to developers and companies building AI agents, chatbots, research tools and data enrichment pipelines that need fresh, structured web results.
Popular alternatives to Exa include PimEyes, Nouswise and YARN. Compare their pricing and what each is best for below.
| Tool | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| PimEyes | Freemium | Individuals checking where their own photos appear online, and privacy or copyright professionals auditing image misuse. |
| Nouswise | Freemium | Researchers, students and teams who want cited answers from their own books, papers and notes instead of open web result... |
| YARN | Free | Social media users and meme makers who want to find and share a short clip that matches a specific quote. |
| Freemium | iPhone and iPad owners who want Google Search, Lens and Gemini-powered answers in a single app. | |
| Lenso.ai | Freemium | Photographers, designers and researchers who need to trace where an image appears online or find uncredited copies of th... |
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