Exa Search + Contents

Use Exa Search on Apify to retrieve source-grounded web results with highlights. The Actor wraps Exa's Search endpoint with contents.highlights enabled by default, giving compact results for agents, RAG, research, and data products.

What it does

• Runs Exa Search from a natural-language query
• Supports auto and deep search
• Returns titles, URLs, metadata, highlights, and scores
• Supports include/exclude domain filters
• Lets you cap highlight length with maxCharacters
• Supports Deep-only structured JSON output
• Stores normalized rows in the Apify dataset
• Stores the full Exa response as OUTPUT

Input

Required: query.

Optional: searchType (auto or deep, default auto), numResults, includeDomains, excludeDomains, maxCharacters, and extraRequestOptions.

Deep-only: additionalQueries, systemPrompt, outputSchema.

Example

{
  "query": "Latest research in LLM agents",
  "searchType": "auto",
  "numResults": 5,
  "includeDomains": ["arxiv.org", "openreview.net"]
}

Deep structured output example

{
  "query": "Name two current themes in language agent research",
  "searchType": "deep",
  "systemPrompt": "Return a compact answer with source URLs.",
  "outputSchema": {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
      "answer": { "type": "string" },
      "sources": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "string" } }
    },
    "required": ["answer", "sources"]
  }
}

Output

Each dataset row is one Exa result:

{
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "Example result",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "highlights": ["Relevant excerpt..."],
  "highlightScores": [0.92],
  "structuredOutput": null
}

For Deep structured output, structuredOutput is attached to result rows. The raw response is stored as OUTPUT; run metadata is stored as SUMMARY.

This Actor uses managed Exa API access. Set EXA_API_KEY as an Apify environment variable or secret.

Local development

Install the Apify CLI, set EXA_API_KEY, and run:

apify run

Billing

The Actor uses the Apify SDK for input, dataset, key-value store, and pay-per-event billing. Billing is a straight pass-through of Exa's own cost: every Exa response includes costDollars.total, which already reflects Exa's pricing. The first 10 results and their contents (highlights, text, or summary) are included in the base price; results beyond 10 add to the cost, and deep search uses the $12/1k tier. The Actor bills that exact amount by charging the exa_api_cost event once per $0.00001 of Exa cost.

To configure pay-per-event pricing, define a single charge event:

• Event name: exa_api_cost (must match CHARGE_EVENT_NAME)
• Price: $0.00001 per event

Because the charge count is derived from costDollars.total, the amount billed automatically tracks result count and search depth with no per-tier configuration.