Exa (Search & Research API)

Exa: The AI Search API That Understands Intent, Not Just Keywords

Welcome to the next evolution of search. Forget the endless cycle of tweaking keywords and sifting through irrelevant results. Meet Exa, formerly known as Metaphor, a groundbreaking search and research API designed for the AI era. Developed to power intelligent applications, Exa moves beyond simple string matching to understand the concept and intent behind your query. It’s not just a search engine; it’s a knowledge discovery engine, providing developers with the tools to build applications that can find, understand, and connect information in truly meaningful ways.

Capabilities: A Gateway to the Web’s Knowledge

Exa’s primary capability is its powerful, AI-native approach to information retrieval through its API. It doesn’t generate content like images or videos itself, but rather provides an unparalleled ability to find and process existing content from across the web.

• Advanced Text & Data Retrieval: This is Exa’s core strength. It allows you to build applications that can perform deep research, find niche articles, gather specific data points, or monitor online discussions with incredible precision. It returns not just links, but also clean, extracted text content from web pages, saving immense development time.
• Sourcing Multimedia & Documents: While not a generator, Exa can be used to build systems that locate specific images, videos, research papers, or PDF documents based on a conceptual description. For example, you could search for “a high-quality video of a drone flying over a Scandinavian fjord at sunset.”
• Code & Technical Search: Developers can use Exa to find highly specific code snippets, API documentation, or solutions to complex engineering problems that traditional search engines often miss.

Features That Set Exa Apart

Exa is packed with features that empower developers to create truly intelligent search experiences. It’s more than just a list of results; it’s a structured, accessible, and insightful look into the web’s information.

• True Semantic Search: The cornerstone of Exa. You can search using full sentences, questions, or abstract concepts. Exa’s neural network architecture understands the meaning and returns results that are conceptually related, not just ones that contain the same words.
• The “Find Similar” Endpoint: This is a game-changer. Provide Exa with a URL, and its API will return a list of other pages on the internet that are conceptually similar. It’s perfect for discovering related research, finding competing products, or building recommendation engines.
• Clean Content Extraction: With a simple API call, you can get the core text content of any search result, stripped of HTML, ads, and boilerplate. This makes it incredibly easy to feed high-quality data directly into Large Language Models (LLMs) or other AI systems for summarization, analysis, or question-answering.
• Powerful Filtering & Operators: Fine-tune your searches with advanced operators. You can limit results to specific domains, exclude others, search within a certain date range, and much more, giving you granular control over the information you retrieve.
• Designed for LLM Integration: Exa is built to be the perfect companion for LLMs like GPT-4. Its high-quality, relevant, and clean results provide the ideal context for language models to generate accurate and well-sourced answers.

Pricing: Plans for Every Stage of Growth

Exa offers a flexible pricing structure, making its powerful technology accessible to everyone from individual hobbyists to large-scale enterprises.

The Hacker Plan (Free)

• Price: $0/month
• Includes: 1,000 API requests per month.
• Best for: Hobbyists, students, and developers looking to experiment with the API and build personal projects or prototypes. A fantastic way to get started without any commitment.

The Launch Plan

• Price: Starts at $50/month (with usage-based pricing)
• Includes: A higher volume of API requests, access to the powerful “Get Contents” endpoint, and faster support.
• Best for: Startups, small businesses, and professional developers building and launching commercial applications that require reliable, high-quality search capabilities.

The Enterprise Plan

• Price: Custom
• Includes: Very high request volumes, dedicated infrastructure, premium support, custom model fine-tuning, and enterprise-grade security and compliance features.
• Best for: Large companies and established platforms that require massive scale, maximum reliability, and bespoke solutions tailored to their specific data and search needs.

Who is Exa Built For?

Exa’s versatility makes it a valuable tool for a wide range of professionals who need to interact with web data in a more intelligent way.

• AI & Software Developers: The primary audience. Anyone building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications, AI agents, custom search interfaces, or data analysis pipelines.
• Product Managers: Individuals designing products that require sophisticated search, content discovery, or recommendation features.
• Researchers & Academics: Professionals who need to automate literature reviews, find obscure papers, and track the latest developments in their field more efficiently.
• Data Scientists & Analysts: Teams looking to gather specific, high-quality datasets from the web for training models or conducting market analysis.
• Content Strategists & Marketers: Creatives seeking to uncover niche content, identify trends, and find unique angles for their campaigns by understanding the web’s conceptual landscape.

Alternatives & Comparison

While Exa is a leader in neural search, it’s helpful to understand its position relative to other tools.

• Google Programmable Search Engine & Bing Web Search API: These are the traditional incumbents. They are powerful and scalable but fundamentally keyword-based. They are excellent for exact-match searches but lack Exa’s deep semantic understanding and ability to find conceptually related content. Choose them if you need classic, keyword-driven web search. Choose Exa for intent-driven, conceptual discovery.
• Perplexity AI API & You.com API: These are closer competitors in the AI-native search space. They often focus on providing direct, conversational answers synthesized from search results. Exa, by contrast, focuses on providing the best possible raw search results and clean content, giving developers more control and flexibility to build their own summarization or answering layers. Choose them for a pre-packaged answer engine. Choose Exa for a powerful and flexible search/research building block.
• DIY with Vector Databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate): The most hands-on alternative involves scraping the web yourself and indexing the content in a vector database. This offers maximum customization but comes with enormous overhead in terms of infrastructure, maintenance, and crawling. Exa provides a ready-made, planet-scale index of the web, saving you thousands of hours of engineering effort.