Exa MCP Server

Use it when

• Your coding or research agent keeps answering from stale training data and needs live web search results inside the conversation.
• An MCP client needs to fetch the full content of specific URLs as clean markdown for grounding or summarization.

What it solves

Not the fit when

• Fully offline or air-gapped setups; it is a hosted service backed by the Exa API
• High-volume unauthenticated use; anonymous access is rate limited and higher limits require OAuth or an API key
• Sites requiring session auth or CAPTCHA bypass
• self-hosted private search index
• scraping sites behind logins or bot walls
• bulk crawling of thousands of pages
• local semantic search over your own documents

Install

Point any MCP client at https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp (Claude: claude plugin install exa@claude-plugins-official; Codex: codex mcp add exa --url https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp)

Invoke

Once connected, the agent calls web_search_exa for live search results or web_fetch_exa to read a URL as clean markdown; append ?tools=web_search_advanced_exa,agent_run to the URL to enable optional tools.

Alternatives

No reviewed alternatives recorded yet.