Exa

Neural search API built for AI agents and RAG pipelines

Pricing

Freemium

Company

Exa

Founded

2021

Free tier with 1,000 searches/month; Pro from about $25/month; Enterprise custom

Who It's For
AI agent developersRAG pipeline engineersStartups building AI research tools
Details
CompanyExa
Founded2021
WebsiteVisit

About Exa

Exa (formerly Metaphor) provides a search API optimized for LLM retrieval — returning clean, structured web content rather than SEO-optimized snippets. AI agent developers and RAG pipeline builders use Exa to give their systems real-time, high-quality web knowledge with semantic search capabilities.

Key Features

  • Neural semantic search API
  • Clean content extraction for RAG
  • Real-time web indexing
  • Similar page discovery
  • Structured JSON output for agents

Pros & Cons

Pros

+ Purpose-built for LLM retrieval vs traditional search APIs

+ High-quality content extraction

+ Strong semantic search accuracy

Cons

- Developer API only — no consumer search UI

- Pricing scales with search volume

- Smaller index than Google for obscure queries

Use Cases

RAG pipeline web retrievalAI agent real-time knowledge lookupResearch automation for AI workflows

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