The Rise of Exa Search in GEO

Traditional search indexes are one of the most important tools that LLMs can tap into. Google and Microsoft have their own index, but most AI tools can not simply tap into them. This is where Exa search is growing, as a new third option for other people to build on top of.

2 min read
Looking out through a hole into the light

If the last decade of SEO was about speaking Google’s language, the next one will be about speaking the language of AIs. A growing number of AI assistants, agent frameworks, and enterprise apps interact with traditional search, much like a person would, except they don't all have access to the same search engines. Gemini has Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have Bing, and everyone else is left out in the cold. This where Exa comes into play. Exa is a purpose-built search engine for LLMs and fills the role of an openly accessible third player in the space.

What is Exa?

Exa is a web search and crawling platform exposed through four core features:

  • /search: a hybrid keyword + neural ('meaning-based') search that returns URLs and page text/summaries (similar to Google search).
  • /contents: a cleaner, parsed page fetch (with options for live crawling, highlights, summaries, images, and subpage crawling).
  • /answer: a quick, citation-backed answer generated from Exa search results.
  • /research: an agentic, multi-step “deep research” pipeline that returns structured JSON with citations.

Under the hood, Exa maintains its own web index and blends keyword and neural search. Its 'next-link prediction' model aims to retrieve pages by meaning (not just exact keywords), with an accelerated 'Exa Fast' mode for latency-sensitive agents.

Exa also publishes what it indexes (papers, personal pages, news, Wikipedia, GitHub, company homepages, legal/government sources, etc.), this makes it easier for LLMs to dive deeper into Exa and retrieve specific entities when needed. Typically with Google search entities are surfaced relatiely ad-hoc when they are derived from keywords, Exa gives more granular control over this.

What Should Brands Do?

Exa is a new search platform to keep an eye on, but it's not doing anything fundamentally new. If you are writting good content that is getting indexed and ranked on Google and Bing, you're probably in a good position to do well with Exa.

You should run a few quick checks to make sure you are visible to Exa though. Currently there is no 'search console' for Exa to monitor your sites health in their index. Visit Exa's consumer search tool, add a filter for your specific website domain, and then ensure you're content is showing up. If it is, no further action needed at this stage!

Ready to optimize your AI presence?

Start tracking how your brand appears in AI search results and get actionable insights to improve your visibility.

Get started for freeRead more articles