First-party app
Exa

Exa

AI-native web search, content retrieval, and answers via Exa.

stable SearchAI & Machine Learning

About

Exa ships in the w6w first-party pack. It declares 9 actions, 3 health checks, and the host runs its code in a sandbox that never sees the credential.

App id
io.w6w.exa
Version
0.1.0
Author
w6w
Licence
MIT
Categories
Search · AI & Machine Learning

Overview

Exa is a search engine built for AI: instead of ten blue links, it returns embeddings-ranked, LLM-summarized web results built for a workflow to consume directly. This app covers its core surface — Search (prompt-engineered web search with several latency/depth modes), Get Contents (crawled text/highlights/summaries for known URLs), Find Similar Links (semantic similarity search from a seed URL), and Answer (a direct, cited answer synthesized from web search) — plus a slice of the newer Websets API, which runs an ongoing entity search (companies, people, publications, …) rather than one page of results: create, look up, list and delete a Webset, and list the items it has found.

Exa charges per call rather than by subscription, which shapes two choices here: the auth connection test and both health checks read GET /v0/teams/me (free account metadata) instead of a live search, and a dedicated health check declares the one thing the API genuinely does not expose — a queryable prepaid credit balance — as absent rather than guessing at it.

Build with Exa

Three routes to the same 9 actions. The Workflow tab is generated from Exa's own manifest and carries its real ids, so it is copy-pasteable; the Code and CLI examples are the same call for any action on any app, so every app-specific value in them is a blank you fill in.

Answer

answer

Get a direct, cited answer to a question, synthesized from web search results.

Create Webset

create-webset

Start a Webset: an ongoing search for entities matching a natural-language query.

Delete Webset

delete-webset

Permanently delete a Webset.

Find Similar Links

find-similar

Find pages semantically similar to a given URL.

Get Contents

get-contents

Fetch crawled content (text, highlights, summary) for a set of URLs.

Get Webset

get-webset

Look up a Webset by id, including its status, searches and enrichments.

List Webset Items

list-webset-items

List the items (entities) a Webset has found so far.

List Websets

list-websets

List Websets, optionally filtered by id, external id, or title.

Search

search

Search the web with Exa's prompt-engineered, embeddings-based search.

A workflow step names the app and the action, and the editor fills in the connection when you pick one. This is the Step shape from the workflow spec, carrying Exa's real ids.

{
  "manifestVersion": "2",
  "name": "exa-example",
  "steps": [
    {
      "id": "answer",
      "uses": {
        "app": "io.w6w.exa",
        "action": "answer",
        "connection": "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID"
      },
      "with": {
        "query": "<query>"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Here are some of the things you can do

  • Answer

    perform
    answer
  • Create Webset

    perform
    create-webset
  • Find Similar Links

    search
    find-similar
  • Get Contents

    read
    get-contents
  • Get Webset

    read
    get-webset

+4 more actions available

Every app-specific value here is a blank you have to fill in. An app action is reached through the connection that authenticates it, so the address is a connection id, not the app id — and connections belong to your account, so a public page cannot know yours. Create one for Exa, then fill in the three blanks: conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID, the action key, and the parameters that action declares. The call itself is real — the shape is transcribed from the studio's own snippet builder, which prints the same kind of blanks — but nothing in it is specific to Exa. The Workflow tab is where this app's real ids are.

Install
npm install @w6w/sdk
yarn add @w6w/sdk
pnpm add @w6w/sdk
deno add npm:@w6w/sdk
Code
import { W6wClient, isActionRun } from "@w6w/sdk";

// Reads W6W_BASE_URL and W6W_TOKEN from the environment when omitted.
const client = new W6wClient();

const envelope = await client.run({
  urn: "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID",
  action: "answer",
  payload: {
    query: "<value>",
    // text: "<value>",
    // model: "<value>",
    // systemPrompt: "<value>",
    // userLocation: "<value>",
    // outputSchema: "<value>",
  },
});

if (isActionRun(envelope)) console.log(envelope.value);
Install the CLI
npm install -g @w6w/cli
CLI
w6w run conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID --action answer --payload '{"query":"<value>"}'

Give an AI agent Exa — without giving it Exa's credentials. One MCP endpoint exposes every app, function and workflow the caller is entitled to, as tools it can discover and run. Access is granted per team while we onboard.

One tool call
{
  "name": "w6w_invoke",
  "arguments": {
    "ref": "app:io.w6w.exa#answer",
    "input": {
      "query": "<query>"
    }
  }
}

Every tool names its target with a single ref. The app: form above doesn't name a connection at all — the host resolves which of the caller's Exa connections to sign with, and refuses rather than guesses when the answer is ambiguous.

What the agent gets

Credentials it can't read

The token is attached host-side, at the moment of the call. It is never a tool argument, never in the model's context, and never in a transcript — so a prompt injection has nothing to exfiltrate.

A tool surface scoped to the caller

Tools are derived per end user from what that person has actually connected and is entitled to — not one shared bot identity carrying the union of everyone's access.

A durable workflow in one call

Multi-step work runs on the workflow engine and returns a run handle the agent can poll — retries, branching and state survive the conversation that started them.

Health-aware discovery

Exa's declared health checks are on the surface too, so an agent can tell "the vendor is down" from "your credential expired" before it burns a retry on either.

The MCP surface is part of the hosted platform. Exa itself is MIT, and the runtime that executes it is source-available (FSL).

Request MCP access

Health checks

Exa declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.

service

Exa platform status

Component status from status.exa.ai's components.json: Search API (People, Default), Websets, Exa MCP.

quota

Concurrency headroom

Active/queued request concurrency against this team's limits, from GET /v0/teams/me.

quota

Prepaid credit balance

Not exposed: the Exa OpenAPI spec documents no account/credits/balance endpoint — only each response's own after-the-fact costDollars.