Exa

Exa is a real-time AI search engine designed specifically for AI agents and developers who need programmatic access to web data. At its core, Exa offers a unified API that consolidates three primary functions: web search, web crawling, and deep research. The web search API allows developers to query the internet in real time, returning structured results that include not only URLs and snippets but also rich metadata such as content categories, publication dates, and entity relationships. The crawling API enables systematic extraction of structured content from target websites, supporting both single-page and bulk scraping with configurable parameters like depth, delay, and output formats (JSON, Markdown, HTML). The deep research tool goes beyond simple keyword matching by using AI reasoning to find relevant information across multiple sources, synthesize findings, and return answers rather than just links. Performance is a key feature: standard search queries execute in approximately 450 milliseconds, while the auto mode (which intelligently adjusts depth based on query complexity) takes about 1 second, and the deep mode can take up to 10 seconds for comprehensive analysis. The search engine covers multiple verticals: full web, news, companies, research papers, financial data, and individuals. Each vertical is optimized with domain-specific indexing and ranking algorithms—for example, the financial vertical prioritizes SEC filings, earnings transcripts, and market data, while the research vertical emphasizes academic papers and preprints. Results can be filtered by date range, language, domain, and content type. Exa also provides a specialized agent feature called "Search Agent" that handles complex multi-step queries. For instance, a developer building a coding assista