Exa

Traditional search engines were built to hand a human ten blue links; Exa is built to hand an LLM the actual content it needs to reason. Its neural, embeddings-based search understands what you mean rather than matching keywords, and — crucially — it returns clean page content directly, so you skip the brittle scrape-and-parse step that plagues most agent pipelines. Layer on Deep Search for multi-step research and Websets for curated, structured entity lists, and Exa becomes a genuine search layer for RAG and agents rather than a chatbot bolted onto Google. Pricing is usage-based (roughly $7 per 1,000 searches, more for Deep Search), which Exa simplified and lowered in early 2026, with the content of the top ~10 results free and about $10 of credits to start. The caveats are inherent to the model: pay-as-you-go costs are hard to forecast at scale, this is a developer API rather than a site you browse, and for exact-match lookups keyword engines can still feel sharper. But if you're building agents or RAG and tired of gluing together a scraper and a search box, Exa is one of the cleanest answers going.