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

​
How to set up Exa

​
Authentication

Exa uses API key authentication:
  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

​
Connection details

FieldDescription
API keyYour Exa API key

​
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

​
Response data

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

​
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