Exa 3.0 Search API Tops Perplexity, Brave and Parallel on 8 Benchmarks

Exa has shipped Exa 3.0, a new version of its web search API for AI agents. The company says it improves retrieval across every search type, adds a cheaper option called Exa Lite, and makes Dynamic Highlights generally available. It also says the release leads Perplexity, Brave and Parallel on eight benchmarks, though all of those tests were run by Exa itself.

The practical hook for developers is price. Exa Lite is set at $4 per 1,000 requests, while Exa Auto is listed at $7 per 1,000 requests. Exa says Lite runs on the same index as Auto, but uses less compute. Auto does more work on candidate generation, highlights and ranking, while Lite supports a narrower set of parameters and will return a 400 error if a pipeline sends something it doesn't accept.

Exa’s pitch rests on three changes under the hood. First, a larger embedding model, though the company does not disclose its size or architecture. Second, Dynamic Highlights, which picks tokens across all results instead of page by page and is said to use 95% fewer tokens than full page text while improving answer quality. Third, billions of new documents, including products, local businesses, flights, events, sports and weather.

The benchmark picture is mixed in the way self-run benchmark pictures often are. Exa says Exa 3.0 Auto came first on all eight tests, with the biggest gaps on WebCode and ATLAS. But some margins are tiny. On BrowseComp, Exa’s lead over Perplexity is just 0.3 points. On ATLAS, Exa scores 42.0% versus Perplexity’s 37.2%.

The expanded index is clearly aimed at assistant-style search. Exa says it now covers 1.27 billion ecommerce listings, 211 million-plus local businesses, 320 million people pages, 33 million company pages, 500 million research paper pages, 19 million SEC filings, 10 million patents and 9 million court opinions. It also says the system is hosted only, with no self-hosted option, and configurable latency from 450ms to 1s. That's a very particular kind of product: useful, fast, and wrapped in just enough benchmark glitter to make the procurement meeting harder than it should be.