AI web search
How to use
Exa.
Finding web sources with semantic and filtered search, retrieving page contents, and supplying inspectable evidence to research or agent workflows.
Exa is a web search, content retrieval, and research API for AI applications. Finding web sources with semantic and filtered search, retrieving page contents, and supplying inspectable evidence to research or agent workflows. This guide covers the whole path in one place: official access, a first session that produces something reviewable, the checks that make output trustworthy, and the permissions worth limiting before you connect real work.
AI should make the work easier to inspect. If the workflow removes the source, the owner, or the review step, redesign the workflow.
Access & setup
Find, install, and sign in to Exa
Get into the official Exa experience with the right account and a setup you understand.
- 01
Start at https://exa.ai/ and confirm the domain before entering account or payment information.
- 02
Availability: Exa is accessed through its web platform, HTTP API, SDKs, and integrations rather than a required desktop application.
- 03
An Exa account and API key, network access, and a secure server-side or development environment.
- 04
Sign in with the account you intend to keep using, then review plan, data, notification, and permission settings.
- 05
Run one low-risk test task before connecting sensitive files, repositories, or workspace data.
- Use official download pages.
- Review permissions during setup.
- Keep installers and applications updated.
First session
Your first useful Exa session
Learn the interaction loop using a small task with a clear outcome.
- 01
Create a development API key and keep it in a server-side environment secret.
- 02
Define a search benchmark with expected sources, freshness, domains, and evidence fields.
- 03
Run a filtered search that returns URLs and highlights, then inspect ranking and source quality manually.
- 04
Retrieve full contents only for curated URLs and retain citation and retrieval metadata with every excerpt.
- State the outcome before the background.
- Provide the real source material.
- Review the result before expanding the task.
Quality control
Check the quality of Exa output
Establish that a retrieved answer is actually supported by the sources it cites.
- 01
Restate the question precisely; retrieval quality degrades fastest on vague or compound queries.
- 02
Open the cited sources and confirm each one genuinely contains the claim attributed to it.
- 03
Check the publication and capture dates — stale sources are the most common cause of confidently wrong answers.
- 04
Look for what is missing: retrieval returns what matches the query, not what would contradict it.
- 05
Confirm quotations are verbatim and that summaries have not reversed a qualification or a negation.
- Open the citation; do not trust that a link supports the claim beside it.
- Check dates on every retrieved source.
- Treat an absent contradiction as unverified, not as agreement.
Privacy & permissions
Use Exa safely
Control what you index and what leaves your systems when you query it.
- 01
Classify the corpus before indexing: confidential, personal, and regulated material needs an explicit decision.
- 02
Confirm where the index is stored, who can query it, and how long content is retained.
- 03
Scope crawling and scraping to sources you are permitted to collect, and respect robots and terms of use.
- 04
Strip secrets and personal data before indexing rather than filtering them at query time.
- 05
Review query logs — the questions asked can be as sensitive as the documents indexed.
- Search results and page contents can be wrong, stale, malicious, copyrighted, or sensitive. Protect keys, constrain domains and cost, moderate exposed queries, treat retrieved text as untrusted, preserve citations, and verify evidence before action or publication.
- Follow your organisation's approved-use policy.
- Never treat fluent output as authorization to act.
Core workflows
Step-by-step ways to use Exa for the work it does best.
Each workflow is a separate guide with its own steps and review checkpoints.
Retrieve relevant pages and evidence while controlling domains, dates, content depth, moderation, and cost.
↗ 02 WorkflowCreate a safe search-and-contents research pipeline with ExaSeparate discovery from page retrieval so sources can be curated before their content enters model context.
↗Official references
Check the current product documentation.
Features, plan limits, availability, and data controls change. These official pages are the starting points used for this guide.