> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getcargo.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Exa

> Connect Exa to run AI-native web search in your Cargo workflows.

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](https://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

| Field       | Description      |
| ----------- | ---------------- |
| **API key** | Your Exa API key |

***

## Exa actions

### Search

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