tech
January 28, 2026
Exa AI Research Blog
Discover the latest in AI research and semantic search technology on the Exa blog. Learn how our neural network search engine provides high-quality web data for AI applications
TL;DR
- Exa 2.1 offers significant quality improvements across Exa Fast, Exa Auto, and Exa Deep search API endpoints.
- The Exa MCP quality has been dramatically improved with a new deep search tool.
- Exa Fast is now the most accurate search API with latency under 500ms.
- Exa Deep is positioned as the highest accuracy search API, utilizing multiple agentic searches for optimal results.
- Exa has built its own independent document index and retrieval algorithm, allowing for faster performance than APIs relying on Google Search.
- Evaluation methodologies for fast and MCP settings are detailed, using GPT-5 mini and gpt-4o-mini for grading.
- The company emphasizes the challenge and R&D involved in building a search engine from scratch, including semantic+lexical databases and large-scale crawling infrastructure.
- Future updates, such as Exa 2.2, are planned with continued scaling of techniques and infrastructure.