Exa is a modern AI search engine designed to empower applications with advanced web search and crawling capabilities, including a SERP API, website crawler tools, and a deep research API. Its core offering centers around "Agentic Search," which is developed in-house by Exa's AI research lab, providing full controllability over the search process.

The methodology for evaluating Exa's Agentic Search performance involves a sophisticated testing framework. A "simple but powerful agent," typically an advanced language model such as GPT-5, is given access to Exa's Master Control Program (MCP) API. This agent is allowed to interact with the MCP through up to 10 sequential API calls to perform a task. The final output generated by the agent is then rigorously graded for accuracy against an expected answer using a smaller, yet capable, language model like GPT-4o-mini.

Exa's Agentic Search capabilities are benchmarked against several well-known datasets and frameworks to validate its efficacy:

• FRAMES: A dataset released by Google, specifically designed to assess Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications based on their factuality, retrieval accuracy, and reasoning abilities.
• MultiLoKo: A multilingual local knowledge benchmark that spans 31 languages, evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to handle diverse geographical and linguistic contexts.
• Seal0: This benchmark evaluates web search systems specifically for their robustness and accuracy when dealing with conflicting, noisy, and ambiguous information.
• BrowseComp: An evaluation framework created by OpenAI, which measures the proficiency of AI agents in locating difficult-to-find information on the web.

In benchmark tests, Exa demonstrates high accuracy with its "Deep Parallel Linkup" Agentic Search API, achieving performance metrics such as 96% accuracy on FRAMES, 94% on MultiLoKo, 91% on Seal0, and 89% on BrowseComp. It is noted that these Agentic Search APIs typically exhibit high latency, exceeding 2 seconds, which implies a trade-off for the depth and accuracy of the results provided.

Exa provides a comprehensive suite of functionality accessible through five primary API endpoints:

• Search: Allows users to search for a list of results and retrieve their corresponding contents. For example, exa.search_and_contents("space companies based in the US").
• Crawl: Enables the retrieval of all pages on a specified website along with their contents.
• Answer: Provides natural language summaries of web search results.
• Research: Delivers in-depth research with structured output.
• Websets: Exa's most powerful search offering, designed to handle complex queries and return thousands of results.

The platform is engineered to support diverse industry-specific data needs, including:

• Coding Agents: Specialized search across platforms like Stack Overflow, coding documentation, and GitHub repositories, powered by a model trained for high-accuracy code referencing.
• Finance: Provides historical data on market movements, company growth, S&P 500, and news from various time periods, used for training market prediction models.
• Recruiting: Offers top-tier search across LinkedIn and other people profiles to find relevant candidate information.
• Productivity: Facilitates broad web access for searching and summarizing recent news, trends, or general curiosities.
• Consulting: Enables instant, in-depth research into any industry or topic, aggregating information from 10k documents, PDFs, and thousands of web pages, leveraging Websets to identify industry experts.
• Marketing: Supports searching across niche reference materials, expert blogs, and social platforms like Twitter, with the search index updated minute-by-minute to capture the latest news and trends for campaign generation.

Exa also features robust filtering capabilities to refine search results, allowing users to tailor their search based on category (e.g., legal papers, financial data, coding docs, GitHub repos, blog posts), location, domain, specific phrases, and published date.

For enterprise users, Exa offers full autonomy with its proprietary search index, including high-volume search tiers with comprehensive Data Processing Agreements (DPAs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and high-capacity rate limits. Security and compliance features include Zero Data Retention (ZDR) for customizable data purging, SOC 2 Type II certification for maintaining high compliance standards, and Single Sign-On (SSO) for secure team authentication and authorization management.