tech
January 28, 2026
Web Search API Evals: Exa's Neural Network Search Engine vs. The Competition
Get an inside look at the rigorous evaluation process at Exa. Our AI research blog shows how we ensure our neural network search engine provides the highest quality results.
TL;DR
- Exa has built a web search engine designed for LLMs, claiming state-of-the-art performance.
- Benchmarks show Exa outperforming competitors on SimpleQA, a benchmark measuring LLM factuality in answering questions.
- Exa's search engine also demonstrated superior retrieval quality on the MSMARCO dataset when evaluated using an LLM-as-Judge method.
- The company plans to release more benchmarks to test search quality in diverse real-world use cases.