Exa Releases 3.0 Search Upgrade and Lite Tier

Exa, a web search company, released Exa 3.0 on October 19, 2026, which it describes as the largest search-quality improvement it has ever shipped. The company says Exa 3.0 ranks first on every benchmark it tested, spanning public evaluations as well as coding, finance, and go-to-market intelligence tasks.

The release rests on three retrieval-stack improvements that benefit every search type. Exa trained a larger embedding model using more compute and data than any previous model. It made Dynamic Highlights generally available, a feature that uses 95% fewer tokens than full page text while improving answer quality. It also added billions of documents to its index across data types including products, local businesses, flights, events, sports, and weather.

Alongside 3.0, Exa launched Exa Lite, a new search type priced at $4 per 1,000 requests and aimed at cost-sensitive applications. Lite runs on the same index as Exa Auto, which uses more compute across candidate generation, highlights, and ranking for higher quality. The company says Lite and Auto together set a new Pareto frontier for search.

Dynamic Highlights, previewed earlier this year, is now generally available at no additional charge. Instead of extracting highlights from each page, the new model selects tokens across all results, favoring the best pages and cutting repeated information. Exa says efficiency gains made it substantially faster and cheaper to run.

Exa runs its own crawler and independent index, which tracks over 2 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages. Citing an explosion in usage from personal AI assistants, the company expanded its index and data partnerships. New coverage includes 1.27B ecommerce listings with prices and availability, 211M+ local businesses with hours and ratings, real-time news, sports, weather and market data, and flights, local events, transit, and podcasts. This adds to existing coverage of people, companies, code, and publications.

Exa 3.0 is available today through the API. Exa Lite costs $4 per 1,000 requests and Exa Auto costs $7 per 1,000 requests, while upgraded highlights and expanded data sources are included at no additional charge. A live Q&A with Head of Product Shyam Kumar and Head of R&D Liam Hinzman is scheduled for Wednesday, October 21 at 1pm PT.

Exa, a web search company, released Exa 3.0 on October 19, 2026, which it describes as the largest search-quality improvement it has ever shipped. The company says Exa 3.0 ranks first on every benchmark it tested, spanning public evaluations as well as coding, finance, and go-to-market intelligence tasks.

The release rests on three retrieval-stack improvements that benefit every search type. Exa trained a larger embedding model using more compute and data than any previous model. It made Dynamic Highlights generally available, a feature that uses 95% fewer tokens than full page text while improving answer quality. It also added billions of documents to its index across data types including products, local businesses, flights, events, sports, and weather.

Alongside 3.0, Exa launched Exa Lite, a new search type priced at $4 per 1,000 requests and aimed at cost-sensitive applications. Lite runs on the same index as Exa Auto, which uses more compute across candidate generation, highlights, and ranking for higher quality. The company says Lite and Auto together set a new Pareto frontier for search.

Dynamic Highlights, previewed earlier this year, is now generally available at no additional charge. Instead of extracting highlights from each page, the new model selects tokens across all results, favoring the best pages and cutting repeated information. Exa says efficiency gains made it substantially faster and cheaper to run.

Exa runs its own crawler and independent index, which tracks over 2 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages. Citing an explosion in usage from personal AI assistants, the company expanded its index and data partnerships. New coverage includes 1.27B ecommerce listings with prices and availability, 211M+ local businesses with hours and ratings, real-time news, sports, weather and market data, and flights, local events, transit, and podcasts. This adds to existing coverage of people, companies, code, and publications.

Exa 3.0 is available today through the API. Exa Lite costs $4 per 1,000 requests and Exa Auto costs $7 per 1,000 requests, while upgraded highlights and expanded data sources are included at no additional charge. A live Q&A with Head of Product Shyam Kumar and Head of R&D Liam Hinzman is scheduled for Wednesday, October 21 at 1pm PT.