The outcome
Learn the interaction loop using a small task with a clear outcome.
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 narrows that broad capability into one repeatable outcome, with checkpoints that keep the source material and your judgment in the loop.
Before you begin
Set the boundary before the tool starts.
Choose one real task, identify who will use the result, and decide what evidence or test will make the result acceptable. Gather only the source material needed for that task. If the work contains confidential, personal, regulated, or client-owned information, confirm that the platform and account are approved before sharing it.
AI should make the work easier to inspect. If the workflow removes the source, the owner, or the review step, redesign the workflow.
Step by step
A workflow you can repeat.
- 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.
Working standard
What good use looks like.
- State the outcome before the background.
- Provide the real source material.
- Review the result before expanding the task.
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.
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 collection.