feat: add Exa search tools for AutoGen

[10ishq]

Why are these changes needed?

AutoGen currently has no built-in web search tool. This PR adds four tools that wrap the Exa search API, giving agents a turnkey way to search the web, discover similar pages, retrieve page content, and get AI-generated answers with citations.

An Exa integration was recently shipped in AG2's beta module (ag2ai/ag2#2714). This PR brings the same capabilities to AutoGen, following the BaseTool/Component patterns used by the existing tools in autogen-ext.

Tools

Tool	Description
ExaSearchTool	Web search with optional text content retrieval
ExaFindSimilarTool	Discover pages similar to a given URL
ExaGetContentsTool	Retrieve full text for known URLs
ExaAnswerTool	AI-generated answer with citations

Each tool:

• Inherits from BaseTool and Component with Pydantic arg/return models
• Supports serialisation via _to_config / _from_config
• Has Google-style docstrings with Args sections and code examples
• Uses the current Exa API (exa-py v2) with no deprecated parameters
• Passes integration_source="autogen" to the Exa client for usage tracking

Installation

pip install -U "autogen-ext[exa]"

Quick start

from autogen_ext.tools.exa import ExaSearchTool, ExaAnswerTool

search = ExaSearchTool(num_results=5, search_type="auto")
answer = ExaAnswerTool()

agent = AssistantAgent("researcher", model_client=model, tools=[search, answer])

Changes

• New module autogen_ext/tools/exa/ — _exa_tools.py and __init__.py
• Tests tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py — 17 tests covering all four tools
• Dependency Added exa optional extra (exa-py>=2.0.0,<3) to pyproject.toml
• Lock file Regenerated uv.lock to include exa-py

Related issue number

Checks

• I've included any doc changes needed for https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/. See https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md to build and test documentation locally.
• I've added tests (if relevant) corresponding to the changes introduced in this PR.
• I've made sure all auto checks have passed.

[10ishq]

@microsoft-github-policy-service agree company="Exa"

[10ishq]

Test Results

Tested locally against the real Exa API (exa-py v2.12.1) and with the existing unit test suite.

Unit Tests (17/17 passed)

tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_basic_search PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_search_with_all_params PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_search_with_text_content PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_search_empty_results PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_search_handles_none_title PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_search_tool_schema PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaSearchTool::test_search_tool_config_round_trip PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaFindSimilarTool::test_basic_find_similar PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaFindSimilarTool::test_find_similar_with_params PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaFindSimilarTool::test_find_similar_tool_schema PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaGetContentsTool::test_get_contents PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaGetContentsTool::test_get_contents_multiple_urls PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaGetContentsTool::test_get_contents_tool_schema PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaAnswerTool::test_basic_answer PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaAnswerTool::test_answer_no_citations PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaAnswerTool::test_answer_handles_none_title PASSED
tests/tools/exa/test_exa_tools.py::TestExaAnswerTool::test_answer_tool_schema PASSED

Integration Tests (real Exa API)

Test	Result	Details
ExaSearchTool	Passed	3 results returned with titles, URLs, scores
ExaFindSimilarTool	Passed	2 similar pages for exa.ai
ExaGetContentsTool	Passed	4686 chars retrieved from exa.ai
ExaAnswerTool	Passed	1134-char answer with 8 citations
x-exa-integration header	Passed	Header set to autogen on client
Config round-trip	Passed	All 12 fields preserved
ImportError message	Passed	Correct install instructions shown