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Exa is an AI-native search engine that helps you retrieve high-quality web results with semantic ranking and optional page content extraction.

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How to set up Exa

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Authentication

Exa runs on Cargo credits out of the box, so you can use it without an Exa account. To bill Exa directly instead — or to use Exa as an MCP server, which requires your own key — connect an API key:
  1. Create an Exa account at exa.ai
  2. Generate an API key from your Exa dashboard
  3. Paste the API key when creating the Exa connector in Cargo

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Connection details

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Exa actions

Search the web with Exa and return ranked results. Required fields:
  • Query: Natural language query to search for
Optional fields:
  • Search type: auto, neural, fast, deep, or instant
  • Category: Focus results on a category such as company, people, or news
  • Number of results: Max results to return (up to 100)
  • Include page text: Include extracted page text in the response
  • Include domains: Restrict results to specific domains
  • Exclude domains: Remove results from specific domains
  • Start/End published date: Filter by publication date range
  • Start/End crawl date: Filter by crawl date range
Use cases:
  • Account and company research
  • Competitive intelligence
  • News and trend monitoring
  • Source collection for AI agents

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Response data

Search responses include:
  • URL and title
  • Relevance score
  • Publication and crawl metadata (when available)
  • Extracted text (when enabled)

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Best practices

  • Use auto search type for most workflows
  • Limit domain scope for precise results
  • Enable page text only when needed to reduce payload size
  • Cap Number of results: the first 10 come with the request, and every result past that adds to the bill

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Credits

Exa is billable with Cargo credits, so you can use it without your own Exa account. Costs mirror Exa’s published pricing at $0.04 per Cargo credit.
  • Search: 0.175 credits per search, which covers the first 10 results with their text and highlights
  • Search with the deep search type: 0.3 credits per search, since Exa’s agentic search costs more to run
  • Either way, each result past the tenth adds 0.025 credits, contents included
Cargo tracks credit usage and supports caching to optimize costs.
Using Exa as an MCP server requires your own Exa API key. Tools called over MCP bypass Cargo’s action pipeline, so there is nothing to meter them against your credit balance.

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Rate limits

Exa allows 10 search requests per second. Cargo spreads calls to stay under the limit and retries on rejection. On Cargo credits that limit is shared across all workspaces on Cargo’s key; on your own API key it applies to your connector alone.