Exa Release Notes

Agent Ultra

Agent Ultra is Exa Agent's highest-effort mode, built for large list building, deep multi-source research, and criteria that are hard to verify. Set effort: "ultra" on a run.

• Metered: billed at standard Agent usage rates, up to a default $20 per run. Set budget.maxCostDollars to change the cap.
• Time budget: set budget.maxDurationSeconds (5 minutes to 3 hours) and the run wraps up with what it has found by then.
• Stop early: POST /agent/runs/{id}/stop ends a run and keeps the results gathered so far.

Read the Agent Ultra guide →

Exa Agent and Exa Connect in MCP

Exa Agent is now available within Exa MCP. Use it from Claude, Cursor, or any other MCP client when the task needs more than a single search call.

Enable the Agent tool with https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp?tools=agent_run, then call agent_run to run the agent through completion and return its output.

Exa Connect data sources are available through the Agent flow, so you can attach premium data partners when a run needs more than web search alone.

Read the Exa MCP guide → · Read the Exa Agent guide → · Announcement tweet →

Dynamic Highlights (research preview)

Dynamic Highlights selects excerpts across the complete result set instead of treating each page independently. It gives more of the shared context budget to useful sources and gives less context to sources that only repeat information already returned.

• Single-turn RAG: about 49% better token efficiency and 2.4% higher downstream quality with Exa Auto across coding and general QA evaluations.
• Agents: about 30% fewer tokens across complete agent trajectories and 1% higher quality across BrowseComp, WideSearch, and internal company and people evaluations.

Requests that set dynamic: true require the Exa-Beta: dynamic-highlights-2026-08-28 header.

Read the Dynamic Highlights guide →

Publication research

We significantly expanded and improved research over academic publications.

• 350M publications: search across an index of 350 million publications.
• Richer organization and people results: searches now return both organizations and their affiliated people, each as a detailed, enriched profile spanning publications, top collaborators, research areas, and funding.
• Agentic people and organization search: agents can now search over people and organizations.
• Public retrieval benchmark: we released a public benchmark for publication retrieval.
• New publication search category: query scholarly results with category: "publication", which replaces the research paper category.
• Deprecated categories: the pdf, github, and tweet search categories are being deprecated.
• startCrawlDate / endCrawlDate: deprecated parameters are now ignored for all teams while remaining accepted for compatibility.

Query it via the API with the publication search category, or try it in the dashboard →.

Exa Deep Revamp

Exa Deep is faster, cheaper, and now supports structured outputs with field-level grounding.

• New deep-reasoning type for higher-effort tasks (12-50s); deep runs in 4-12s.
• 20% lower price for regular deep search.
• Structured outputs via outputSchema, with output.content and output.grounding (field-level citations and confidence) in the response.

See the Exa Pricing Update below for full pricing.

Read the Search API reference →

Exa Pricing Update

We simplified and lowered pricing. Contents for the first 10 search results are now included for free, and the new pricing applies automatically with no action needed.

• Search with contents: $7 per 1k requests (10 results, text + highlights included); $1 per 1k additional results.
• Summaries: $1 per 1k, on both search and contents.
• Exa Deep: $12 per 1k requests; Deep (Reasoning) $15 per 1k.
• Contents endpoint: $1 per 1k pages per content type.

View current pricing →

Highlights, content freshness, and MCP updates

Three improvements to content extraction and access:

• maxCharacters for highlights: now the preferred way to control highlight length. numSentences and highlightsPerUrl are deprecated.
• maxAgeHours for content freshness: age-based control replacing boolean livecrawl (0 always crawls, -1 cache-only, 24 crawls if older than 24h).
• Exa MCP free tier: try it unauthenticated at 3 QPS and 150 calls/day; add an API key for full access.

Content freshness docs → · Exa MCP →

Introducing Exa Company Search

Company search now uses a fine-tuned retrieval model and entity-matching pipeline. Use type="auto", category="company".

• Accurate across attributes: industry, geography, funding stage, and employee count.
• Structured entity data: results return typed company info (workforce, HQ, financials, web traffic).
• Use cases: sales prospecting, market research, and supply chain workflows.

Read the Companies & People Search docs → · Read the benchmark blog →

Introducing Exa People Search

People search now spans 1B+ public profiles via a hybrid retrieval system. The linkedin category is replaced by the new people category.

• Broader coverage: profiles across the whole web, not just LinkedIn.
• Better accuracy: fine-tuned embeddings for role, skill, and company queries.
• Use cases: sales, recruiting, and market research.

Read the Companies & People Search docs → · Read the benchmark blog →