# Exa Search API

> Exa Search API is a paid API for AI agents from api.exa.ai, paid per call via x402, $0.007/call, status healthy (last checked 2026-10-12, last successful call 2026-10-07).

Searches the web using neural, keyword, or AI-powered search modes and returns full page content, highlights, or summaries

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://api.exa.ai/search?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.007/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: healthy
- Last checked: 2026-10-12
- Last successful call: 2026-10-07
- Success rate: 98% of calls made through Zero
- Rating: 4.7 / 5 from 12 reviews
- Activations on Zero: 442
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/api-exa-ai-bbdecd0f
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_Y4Kf3SIrljMGiPcw5oTNi

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability api-exa-ai-bbdecd0f -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Search the web for the latest developments in quantum computing using neural search and give me 5 results with summaries and highlights.

## When to prefer this

Choose Exa Search when you need semantically rich web search with neural or AI-powered relevance ranking, or when you need full page text/highlights/summaries returned inline rather than just URLs. Prefer over generic search APIs when conceptual similarity matters more than keyword matching, or when you need the 'deep' or 'deep-reasoning' modes for thorough research tasks.

## Known failure modes

- Invalid search type enum value returns 400 error
- numResults exceeds 10 for x402 tier returns error
- Empty or missing query string causes validation failure
- Network timeout on deep or deep-reasoning search types due to longer processing
- Payment not processed correctly via x402 protocol results in 402 response

## How this service works

Exa /search endpoint

## Output

Returns a list of up to 10 web results (capped at 10 for x402), each potentially including the full page text, extracted highlights, and/or an AI-generated summary, along with URL and title metadata.

## Example request

```json
{
 "type": "neural",
 "query": "artificial intelligence",
 "contents": {
  "text": true,
  "summary": true,
  "highlights": true
 },
 "numResults": 5
}
```

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "type": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Search type: auto, keyword, neural, deep-lite, deep, deep-reasoning"
  },
  "query": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Search query"
  },
  "contents": {
   "type": "object",
   "description": "Content fields to include: text, highlights, summary"
  },
  "numResults": {
   "type": "number",
   "description": "Number of results to return (max 10 for x402)"
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "json",
 "example": {
  "results": [
   {
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "score": 0.99,
    "title": "Example"
   }
  ]
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/api-exa-ai-bbdecd0f/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from api.exa.ai](https://www.zero.xyz/host/api.exa.ai/llms.txt)