Exa Search

Exa Search on xpay — AI-powered semantic search without the signup

Exa Search is a semantic search engine built for AI agents. Instead of keyword matching, it understands meaning and intent, making it ideal for finding relevant content, extracting full pages, and discovering similar resources. Developers typically reach for Exa when they need clean, AI-ready search results or when they want to read webpage content programmatically without parsing HTML themselves.

On xpay, you call Exa Search's tools directly through MCP—no Exa Search account required, no monthly subscription, and you pay only for what you use.

What's available

• web_search_exa ($0.02/call) — Semantic search across the web. Returns clean, ranked results with titles, URLs, and excerpts. Built for finding current information, news, facts, people, companies, or answering questions about any topic.
• web_fetch_exa ($0.02/call) — Read a webpage's full content as clean markdown. Use this after web_search_exa when highlights are insufficient, or to extract content from any known URL. Supports batch operations.

When Exa Search is the right tool

• You need semantic search rather than keyword-based results—Exa understands intent and meaning.
• Your agent must find current information (news, facts, recent events) that's not in its training data.
• You want to extract full webpage content as structured markdown without parsing HTML.
• You're building a research assistant or fact-checking agent that needs live web access.
• You need find-similar capabilities to discover related content or resources.
• You want clean, AI-ready output without boilerplate, ads, or navigation clutter.

When to choose something else

• If you only need keyword-based search, a simpler API like Google Custom Search or Bing may be cheaper and sufficient.
• If your use case is social media monitoring or sentiment analysis, specialized tools (e.g., Brandwatch, Sprout Social) are better fits.
• If you need real-time stock prices, weather, or sports scores, use dedicated APIs for those verticals instead.
• If you're doing large-scale web crawling or SEO analysis, consider headless browser tools or dedicated crawlers.
• If your queries are highly domain-specific (medical, legal, academic), a fine-tuned or specialized search engine may outperform general semantic search.

Pricing snapshot

Both tools are priced identically on xpay. You're billed per invocation; no minimum spend or subscription.

Quickstart

Install the Exa Search MCP endpoint in Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http exa "https://exa.mcp.xpay.sh/mcp?key=YOUR_XPAY_KEY"

Replace YOUR_XPAY_KEY with your xpay API key (get it free at https://xpay.tools after email or Google signup).

Once connected, Claude Code will have access to web_search_exa and web_fetch_exa by their native names. Simply ask Claude to search the web or fetch a page, and it will invoke the tools automatically.

For Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, or VS Code (Copilot): Add this entry to your mcp.json file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "exa": {
      "url": "https://exa.mcp.xpay.sh/mcp?key=YOUR_XPAY_KEY"
    }
  }
}

To use multiple xpay providers in one connection, use the unified endpoint instead:

claude mcp add --transport http xpay "https://mcp.xpay.sh/mcp?key=YOUR_XPAY_KEY"

With the unified endpoint, you'll also have access to xpay_discover(), xpay_details(), and xpay_run() meta-tools to browse and invoke any xpay provider.

Why route Exa Search through xpay?

• No Exa Search signup — xpay holds the provider credentials. You authenticate once with your xpay key and gain access to Exa Search immediately.
• Pay-per-call, no subscription — You're charged only for the calls you make ($0.02 each). No monthly fees, no unused credits.
• MCP-native integration — Exa Search is exposed as a standard MCP endpoint. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, and any MCP-compatible agent.
• Unified billing across providers — If you use multiple APIs (Tavily, Apollo, Perplexity, etc.), xpay consolidates billing into one invoice and one API key.
• Instant activation — Start using Exa Search within seconds of signing up for xpay. No waiting for approval or API key generation from Exa directly.