Exa launches Exa 3.0 search with a cheaper Lite tier Other

Exa has released Exa 3.0, a new version of its web search engine for AI agents, with a larger embedding model, Dynamic Highlights now generally available and a bigger index. It is available today through the Exa API, along with a new cheaper search type called Exa Lite.

Exa announced Exa 3.0 on October 19, 2026. The company calls it "the largest improvement to search quality we've ever released". It is aimed at developers who call the Search API from apps and agents.

What it is

• Embedding model. Exa trained a larger embedding model, with more compute and data than any previous model.
• Dynamic Highlights. The feature is now generally available at no extra charge. Instead of extracting highlights page by page, the model selects tokens across all results. It gives more space to the best pages and cuts repeated information. Exa says this uses 95% fewer tokens than full page text.
• Index. Exa runs its own crawler and an independent index. It tracks over 2 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages.
• New data. Exa added 1.27B ecommerce listings with prices and availability, and 211M+ local businesses with hours and ratings.
• Live data. The index now includes real-time news, sports, weather and market data, plus flights, local events, transit and podcasts.
• Two search types. Exa Lite and Exa Auto run on the same index. Auto uses more compute across candidate generation, highlights and ranking for higher quality. Lite is built for cost-sensitive applications.

Price

The improved highlights and the new data sources are included at no additional charge.

Sources

• Exa: Introducing Exa 3.0
• Exa: Dynamic Highlights
• Exa: Pricing