Exa has released Exa 3.0, an upgrade to its web search API for AI agents. The Exa 3.0 search API ships a larger embedding model and a cheaper search type, Exa Lite. Dynamic Highlights is now generally available. Exa claims that it leads Perplexity, Brave and Parallel on 8 benchmarks. Those benchmarks were run by Exa, so you can treat them as self-reported. For developers, the practical change is cost: Lite costs $4 per 1,000 requests.
TL;DR
- Size: Exa tracks over 2 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages. Embedding model size: Not disclosed.
- Runs on: Hosted API only. Exa lists configurable search latency of 450ms to 1s. No self-hosted option.
- Performance: Exa 3.0 Auto ranks first on all 8 Exa-run benchmarks against Perplexity, Brave and Parallel.
- Best: 91.8% on BrowseComp, plus the widest lead on ATLAS (42.0% vs 37.2% for Perplexity).
- Worst: 42.0% on ATLAS is its lowest percentage score. Its BrowseComp lead over Perplexity is only 0.3 points.
What is Exa 3.0?
Exa 3.0 is a search API release from Exa Labs that upgrades retrieval quality across every search type. It is available through the API. Exa runs its own crawler and an independent index. It is not a wrapper on Google or Bing results.
How does Exa 3.0 improve retrieval?
Exa attributes the gains to 3 changes in its retrieval stack:
- A larger embedding model: Exa trained it with more compute and data than any earlier model. Parameter count is not disclosed.
- Dynamic Highlights, now generally available: The model selects tokens across all results, not page by page. It gives more tokens to better pages and drops repeated information.
- Billions of new documents: New coverage includes products, local businesses, flights, events, sports and weather.
According to the Exa’s post, Dynamic Highlights uses 95% fewer tokens than full page text while improving answer quality. Highlights carry no extra charge. That matters for agents, where context tokens often cost more than search calls.
What is Exa Lite?
Exa Lite is a new search type, set with type: "lite" on the /search endpoint, per the changelog. It runs on the same index as Exa Auto. Auto spends more compute on candidate generation, highlights and ranking. Lite supports query, result count, highlights, text, categories, domain and date filters, location and moderation. Unsupported parameters return a 400 error naming the field.
Exa now recommends 3 search types: lite, auto and deep. The fast, instant and deep-reasoning types are legacy but still work.
How does Exa 3.0 perform on benchmarks?
Exa compared each provider’s highest-scoring single-step endpoint: Exa 3.0 Auto, Perplexity Web, Brave LLM Context and Parallel Advanced. All ran in one agentic harness. The agent was GPT-6 Luna, with up to 25 search rounds and 10 results per search. Evaluation happened in October 2026.
