Exa launches Exa 3.0, saying its search engine for AI agents now ranks first on every benchmark it tested
Introducing Exa 3.0: our largest ever improvement to search quality. Exa is now #1 on every benchmark we tested, from public evals to verticals like coding and GTM intelligence. It's the result of multiple research breakthroughs 馃У
Context
Search is a core tool for AI agents, and better and cheaper retrieval feeds directly into how accurate agents are at research and coding tasks.
The benchmark results are self reported by Exa, which ran all providers in its own harness with a GPT 6 Luna agent, according to the table's notes. Exa sells a search API built for AI agents and said earlier this month it passed $100 million in annualized revenue.
Deep dive
On October 19, Exa posted that it is introducing Exa 3.0, its largest ever improvement to search quality, saying Exa is now first on every benchmark it tested, from public evals to verticals like coding and GTM intelligence, and that this is the result of multiple research breakthroughs.
The attached table compares Exa 3.0 with Perplexity, Brave and Parallel on eight benchmarks. It shows Exa ahead on each, though some margins are small, such as 91.8 percent against Perplexity's 91.5 percent on BrowseComp and 88.2 percent against 87.6 percent on DSQA. Larger gaps appear on ATLAS, at 42.0 percent against 37.2 percent, and WebCode, at 75.5 percent against 69.9 percent. The notes say each provider's highest scoring single step search endpoint was used, all running in the same agent harness evaluated in October 2026.
Exa's blog says the gains come from a larger embedding model trained with more compute and data than any before, Dynamic Highlights, now generally available, which it says uses 95 percent fewer tokens than full page text, and billions of new documents such as ecommerce listings, local businesses and flights. It also launched Exa Lite at $4 per 1,000 requests, with Exa Auto at $7 per 1,000. Startup Fortune noted that outside comparisons show smaller leads than Exa's own tests.
What to expect next
Watch whether independent evaluations confirm Exa's lead, since several of its margins over Perplexity are under one percentage point. Exa plans a live Q and A on October 21, which may give more detail on its methods. Also watch how Perplexity, Brave and Parallel respond on price, since the cheaper Lite tier targets developers running many agent searches, and whether agent builders switch providers based on these results.