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Exa is integrated as a first-class web search backend in FIM One. Agents get access to the full Exa search surface — auto (Exa’s recommended default), neural, fast, deep-lite, deep, deep-reasoning, and instant — plus structured content retrieval (highlights, text, summaries) and rich filtering (categories, include/exclude domains, date ranges, and max-age windows). Sensible defaults ship out of the box, so downstream developers get Exa best practices without manual tuning.

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Why Exa in FIM One

  • Neural search for agent reasoning — Exa’s embedding-native search returns semantically relevant results, not just keyword matches. This matters for research agents that reason over web content.
  • Deep-reasoning mode for hard queries — single-call multi-hop reasoning over the open web, without the agent orchestrating sub-queries itself.
  • Built-in content extraction — highlights + text + optional summaries arrive with the search call, eliminating a second round-trip to fetch and clean page content.
  • Tight domain / recency controls — includes/excludes domain lists (up to 1200 entries), ISO-8601 date windows, and maxAgeHours for time-sensitive workflows.

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Quick start

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1. Get an Exa API key

Sign up at exa.ai and grab your API key from the dashboard.

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2. Set the key in FIM One

Add to your .env: 
EXA_API_KEY=your_key_here
That’s it. If WEB_SEARCH_PROVIDER is unset, FIM One auto-selects Exa when EXA_API_KEY is present. To make Exa explicit: 
WEB_SEARCH_PROVIDER=exa
EXA_API_KEY=your_key_here

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3. Use it from any agent

Web search is exposed to agents as a built-in tool — no extra wiring needed. Agents with web_search enabled will automatically route through Exa.

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Configuration

All Exa-specific knobs have sensible defaults. Override any of them via environment variables:
VariableDefaultDescription
EXA_API_KEY—Required. Your Exa API key.
EXA_SEARCH_TYPEautoOne of auto, neural, fast, deep-lite, deep, deep-reasoning, instant.
EXA_CATEGORY—One of company, research paper, news, personal site, financial report, people.
EXA_INCLUDE_DOMAINS—Comma-separated allowlist (max 1200 entries).
EXA_EXCLUDE_DOMAINS—Comma-separated blocklist (max 1200 entries).
EXA_START_PUBLISHED_DATE—ISO-8601, e.g. 2025-01-01.
EXA_END_PUBLISHED_DATE—ISO-8601.
EXA_MAX_AGE_HOURS—Only return pages indexed in the last N hours.
EXA_INCLUDE_HIGHLIGHTStruePull highlight snippets from results.
EXA_TEXT_MAX_CHARS800Cap on text/snippet length per result.
EXA_SUMMARY_QUERY—Optional custom summary prompt per result.

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How snippets are assembled

FIM One cascades through Exa’s content fields to produce a useful snippet on every result, regardless of which content types the API populated:
  1. highlights (joined with …) — preferred when present
  2. text — falls back to extracted article text, truncated to EXA_TEXT_MAX_CHARS
  3. summary — used when both above are empty
This guarantees downstream agents always have a non-empty snippet to reason over, even for results where Exa couldn’t extract highlights.

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Preset: news monitoring

EXA_SEARCH_TYPE=fast
EXA_CATEGORY=news
EXA_MAX_AGE_HOURS=24
EXA_TEXT_MAX_CHARS=1200

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Preset: research paper retrieval

EXA_SEARCH_TYPE=neural
EXA_CATEGORY=research paper
EXA_INCLUDE_HIGHLIGHTS=true
EXA_TEXT_MAX_CHARS=2000

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Preset: deep-reasoning agent

EXA_SEARCH_TYPE=deep-reasoning
EXA_TEXT_MAX_CHARS=1500
EXA_SUMMARY_QUERY=What is the key finding and its supporting evidence?

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Attribution

Every Exa request from FIM One carries an x-exa-integration: fim-one header so Exa can attribute API usage back to this integration in maintainer dashboards. This is used only for integration-level attribution — no end-user identification or tracking.

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Source

The Exa connector lives at src/fim_one/core/web/search/exa.py and follows the same BaseWebSearch protocol as Jina, Tavily, and Brave — switching providers is a single env-var change.