Exa MCP Server

The Exa MCP Server provides seamless integration with Exa's powerful neural search engine, enabling advanced web search capabilities directly within your MCP-enabled applications. This server combines semantic search, similarity matching, and content retrieval to deliver high-quality, AI-enhanced web results. Whether you're researching topics, discovering related content, or extracting information from specific URLs, the Exa MCP Server offers a comprehensive suite of tools for intelligent web exploration.

Overview

Exa represents a new generation of search technology that goes beyond traditional keyword matching. Using neural networks and semantic understanding, Exa delivers search results that truly understand the intent behind your queries. This MCP server exposes Exa's capabilities through three primary tools and resource templates, making it easy to integrate powerful search functionality into your workflow.

Unlike conventional search engines that rely solely on keyword matching and link popularity, Exa's neural search understands context, meaning, and relationships between concepts. This enables you to find exactly what you're looking for, even when you don't know the precise keywords to use. The server also provides advanced filtering options, allowing you to narrow results by publication date, domain, content type, and custom text patterns.

Features

Neural Search Technology

The server leverages Exa's neural search engine to provide semantic understanding of queries. This means you can search using natural language, concepts, or descriptions, and receive relevant results even when exact keywords don't match. The system automatically understands context and finds content that matches the intent of your search.

Multiple Search Modes

Choose between neural search for semantic matching, keyword search for exact matches, or auto mode that intelligently selects the best approach for your query. This flexibility ensures optimal results regardless of your search requirements.

Content Enrichment

Beyond simple URL lists, the server can retrieve full text content, AI-generated summaries, and highlighted excerpts from search results. This saves time by providing immediate access to the most relevant information without requiring you to visit each page individually.

Advanced Filtering

Fine-tune your searches with comprehensive filtering options including date ranges, domain inclusion/exclusion, category filters, and custom text pattern matching. These filters help you focus on exactly the content you need while eliminating irrelevant results.

Similarity Search

Discover content related to pages you already know about. The similarity search feature uses neural matching to find web pages with related topics, similar writing styles, or comparable information, making it invaluable for research and content discovery.

Tools

exa_search

Perform web searches using Exa's neural search engine with extensive filtering and customization options.

Parameters:

• query (required): The search query string
• searchType: Choose between "neural" (semantic understanding), "keyword" (exact matching), or "auto" (automatically select the best approach). Defaults to "auto"
• numResults: Number of results to return, between 1 and 100. Defaults to 10
• includeText: Whether to include full text content from the pages. Defaults to true
• includeSummary: Add AI-generated summaries of each result's content
• includeHighlights: Include relevant excerpts highlighting key information
• useAutoprompt: Let Exa automatically optimize your query for better results
• category: Filter results by category such as "research paper", "news", or "company"
• startPublishedDate: Only include results published after this date (ISO 8601 format)
• endPublishedDate: Only include results published before this date (ISO 8601 format)
• includeDomains: Array of domains to exclusively search within
• excludeDomains: Array of domains to exclude from results
• includeTextPatterns: Array of text patterns that results must contain
• excludeTextPatterns: Array of text patterns to exclude from results

This tool is ideal for discovering new content, researching topics, finding specific information across the web, and gathering comprehensive data on any subject.

exa_find_similar

Find web pages similar to a given URL using neural similarity matching.

Parameters:

• url (required): The source URL to find similar content for (must be a valid URI)
• numResults: Number of similar results to return, between 1 and 100. Defaults to 10
• includeText: Whether to include full text content from the pages. Defaults to true
• includeSummary: Add AI-generated summaries of similar content
• includeHighlights: Include relevant excerpts from similar pages
• category: Filter similar results by category
• startPublishedDate: Only include results published after this date (ISO 8601 format)
• endPublishedDate: Only include results published before this date (ISO 8601 format)
• excludeSourceDomain: Exclude results from the same domain as the source URL

This tool excels at content discovery, competitive research, finding related articles or papers, and exploring topics in depth by navigating through semantically similar content.

exa_get_contents

Retrieve full content, metadata, and AI-generated summaries for specific URLs in bulk.

Parameters:

• urls (required): Array of 1 to 100 URLs to retrieve content for (each must be a valid URI)
• includeText: Whether to include full text content from the pages. Defaults to true
• includeSummary: Add AI-generated summaries for each URL
• includeHighlights: Include relevant excerpts from each page
• subpages: Number of subpages to include for each URL, between 0 and 10
• livecrawl: Control crawling behavior with "always" (force fresh crawl), "fallback" (use cache but crawl if unavailable), or "never" (only use cached content)

This tool is perfect for extracting information from known URLs, building datasets from web content, monitoring specific pages, and processing multiple URLs efficiently in a single request.

Resource Templates

The server provides three resource templates for accessing Exa data through URI patterns:

exa-search

URI Pattern: exa://search/{query}

Access search results for a specific query through a resource URI. The query parameter should be URL-encoded. This resource returns search results in a structured format that can be easily referenced and shared.

exa-content

URI Pattern: exa://content/{url}

Access the full content and metadata for a specific URL through a resource URI. The URL parameter should be URL-encoded. This provides a consistent interface for retrieving page content regardless of the source.

exa-similar

URI Pattern: exa://similar/{url}

Access similar content results for a given URL through a resource URI. The URL parameter should be URL-encoded. This resource template enables easy discovery of related content through a simple URI pattern.

Use Cases

The Exa MCP Server supports a wide range of applications:

Research and Analysis: Gather comprehensive information on any topic using semantic search, then explore related content through similarity matching. The AI-generated summaries help you quickly assess relevance before diving deep into full content.

Content Discovery: Find articles, papers, and web pages related to your interests. The neural search understands context and relationships, surfacing content you might miss with traditional search engines.

Competitive Intelligence: Monitor specific domains, track similar content to your competitors, and stay informed about industry developments using date-filtered searches and domain-specific queries.

Data Collection: Efficiently extract content from multiple URLs simultaneously, with options for subpage crawling and live content retrieval. Build datasets enriched with AI-generated summaries and highlights.

Academic Research: Search for research papers, find similar studies, and filter by publication date to ensure you're working with current information. Category filters help focus on scholarly content.

Content Curation: Discover and organize high-quality content on specific topics using advanced filtering options and text pattern matching to ensure results meet your criteria.

Understanding Search Types

The server offers three distinct search approaches:

Neural Search uses deep learning models to understand the semantic meaning of your query. It excels at conceptual searches where you're looking for ideas, themes, or topics rather than specific keywords. This mode is particularly effective for exploratory research and discovering content that might use different terminology than your query.

Keyword Search performs traditional exact matching, ideal when you're searching for specific phrases, product names, technical terms, or precise quotes. This mode ensures you find content containing your exact search terms.

Auto Mode intelligently analyzes your query and selects the optimal search approach. For most use cases, auto mode provides the best balance of precision and recall, automatically adapting to your search intent.

Content Enhancement Options

The server provides multiple ways to enrich your results:

Full Text Content gives you immediate access to the complete text of search results, eliminating the need to visit each page individually. This is invaluable for analysis, data extraction, and quick information gathering.

AI-Generated Summaries provide concise overviews of each result's content, helping you quickly assess relevance and decide which results deserve deeper attention. These summaries are particularly useful when processing large numbers of results.

Highlights extract the most relevant excerpts from each result, showing you exactly where and how your query terms or concepts appear in the content. This helps you quickly locate specific information within lengthy documents.

Advanced Filtering Capabilities

The comprehensive filtering system helps you find exactly what you need:

Date Filtering allows you to focus on recent content or explore historical information by specifying publication date ranges. This is essential for time-sensitive research and staying current with developments.

Domain Control lets you limit searches to trusted sources or exclude specific domains entirely. This ensures result quality and helps you focus on authoritative content.

Text Pattern Matching enables precise control over result content through inclusion and exclusion patterns. This is particularly useful for technical searches, compliance requirements, or highly specific information needs.

Category Filtering helps you focus on specific content types like news articles, research papers, or company information, ensuring results match your intended use case.

The Exa MCP Server transforms how you interact with web search, bringing powerful neural search capabilities directly into your MCP-enabled environment. Whether you're conducting research, discovering content, or extracting information at scale, this server provides the tools and flexibility you need for intelligent web exploration.