What is Exa?
Exa is a web search API built for AI agents and LLM applications, returning meaning-based (semantic) results instead of keyword matches. The product includes a Search API, a Contents API that extracts relevant excerpts from pages (claiming around 90% token reduction), an Agent API for structured JSON extraction across a claimed 70M+ company index, a Deep Research mode, and an MCP server for agent integration. Exa reports sub-180ms latency ("Exa Instant") and cites customers including Cognition (Devin), HubSpot, Monday.com, AWS, Databricks, Groq, and Cursor.
Our verdict
Exa suits teams that build agents or LLM applications and want structured, ready-to-use search results instead of raw HTML; its SOC 2 Type II certification and Zero Data Retention also suit enterprise buyers. It is narrower than general-purpose scraping tools: it lacks browser automation and anti-bot bypass, so it covers search and content retrieval rather than arbitrary site access.
Categories:
AI extraction tools sit between a raw page and your database: you describe the fields you want, and a model returns structured JSON or LLM-ready markdown without hand-written selectors. They hold up well when page layouts change often, at the cost of per-request model spend and the occasional wrong field.
