Exa in API Search Engine
Exa's search API returns ranked web results with full text, highlight passages, or summaries. Its /answer endpoint returns an answer with source citations.
Best for
Semantic search returning full page text, highlights, and summaries
Pricing
The pricing page lists search at $4 per 1,000 requests for the lite tier and $7 per 1,000 for auto, with $12 per 1,000 for the deep tiers. Contents cost $1 per 1,000 pages, billed separately for text, highlights and summary, and /answer costs $5 per 1,000 requests. Each account gets $10 of credit that resets monthly.
What it covers
Each search result can carry title, url, publishedDate, author, text, highlights, summary and entities. Results come from Exa's web search index, and the docs do not list other structured data sources.
Citations and verification
The /answer endpoint returns an answer and a citations list with url, title and optional text. The docs do not say the answer is checked against its sources.
API
Endpoints are documented at https://docs.exa.ai/reference/search and https://docs.exa.ai/reference/answer. Rate limits are 10 queries per second for search and answer, 5 per second for deep search, and 100 per second for contents, on both free and pay-as-you-go plans (https://docs.exa.ai/reference/rate-limits).
Strengths and limitations
- Returns full page text, highlights and summaries in one call
- Hosted MCP server at mcp.exa.ai/mcp needs no key for search and fetch
- Lite search tier is the lowest listed per-request price
- Cost depends on which search type and content options are chosen
- Docs describe no claim-checking step
- Deep search is capped at 5 queries per second
Third-party ratings
Not checked
Dated facts
- As of 2026-11-07, Exa's pricing page lists $10 of free credit each month.
- As of 2026-11-07, Exa's rate-limit docs list 10 queries per second for search on the free plan.
- As of 2026-11-07, Exa's MCP docs say search and fetch work without an API key, at a free rate limit.
Exa or Hyperresearch Answers?
Choose Exa for semantic search returning full page text, highlights, and summaries. When an agent needs one checked answer rather than a list of links, Hyperresearch Answers is our editorial choice: it scored 89% on BrowseComp in its own run, and every quote it returns is matched to its source page.
Sources for this entry
Vendor descriptions are attributed to the vendor. Prices change; confirm with each vendor.
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Cite this entry
https://apisearchengine.com/resources/exa/