exa-cli

CLI for the Exa AI search API. All commands support --json for structured output and --plaintext for piping.

<examples> <example> Task: Search for AI startups and get JSON with specific fields

bash

exa search "hottest AI startups" -n 5 --json --fields title,url,score

Output:

json

[
  {"title": "Adept: Useful General Intelligence", "url": "https://www.adept.ai/", "score": 0.95},
  {"title": "Home | Tenyx, Inc.", "url": "https://www.tenyx.com/", "score": 0.89}
]

</example> <example> Task: Get an AI answer with citations

bash

exa answer "What is the capital of France?" --json

Output:

json

{
  "answer": "The capital of France is Paris...",
  "citations": [{"title": "...", "url": "https://..."}],
  "costDollars": {"total": 0.005}
}

</example> <example> Task: Find pages similar to a research paper

bash

exa similar "https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06435" -n 5 --exclude-source --json

</example> <example> Task: Get page contents with summary

bash

exa contents https://example.com --summary --json --fields title,url,summary

</example> <example> Task: Search with filters and count results using jq

bash

exa search "machine learning" -n 10 --category research_paper --start-date 2025-01-01 --json --jq '.results | length'

Output:

code

</example> </examples>

Quick Start

bash

# Install
brew install roboalchemist/tap/exa-cli

# Authenticate
export EXA_API_KEY="your-key-here"
# Or: exa auth

# Search
exa search "query" -n 10 --type auto

Commands

Command	Description
`search [query]`	Web search (types: auto, fast, deep, neural)
`answer [query]`	AI answer with citations (supports `--stream`)
`similar [url]`	Find semantically similar pages
`contents [urls...]`	Retrieve page text, highlights, summaries
`context [query]`	Code context from Exa Code
`usage`	API usage stats and costs
`auth`	Configure API key

Output Formats

•--json (-j) — Structured JSON (all commands)
•--plaintext (-p) — Tab-separated for piping
•--fields title,url,score — Filter JSON fields
•--jq '.results[] | .url' — Built-in JQ filtering

Search Types

Type	Latency	Use
`auto`	Medium	Default, combines methods with reranker
`fast`	<400ms	Real-time applications
`deep`	Higher	Comprehensive, query expansion
`neural`	Medium	Pure semantic/embeddings search

Authentication

Priority: EXA_API_KEY env var > ~/.exa-auth.json config file.

For Agents

•Always use --json for programmatic parsing
•Use --fields to reduce output: --json --fields title,url
•Use --jq for inline filtering: --json --jq '.results[0].url'
•Cost is included in JSON responses under costDollars.total
•Errors output structured JSON to stderr with --json

See reference/commands.md for complete flag reference.