Exa is a web grounding option for building AI agents. Embeddings-native web search built for agents, with full-content retrieval.
npm install exa-js
EXA_API_KEY=
| Option | What it does | Licence | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exa | Embeddings-native web search built for agents, with full-content retrieval. | Proprietary | No |
| Tavily | Search API that returns model-ready answers rather than ten blue links. | Proprietary | No |
| Firecrawl | Turns any site into clean markdown, including the JavaScript-heavy ones. | Open source | Yes |
| Brave Search API | Independent web index with straightforward per-query pricing. | Proprietary | No |
| SearXNG | Self-hosted metasearch. No third-party search vendor in the path. | Open source | Yes |
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/c/exa