Exa Semantic Search

A VC firm used Exa for deal sourcing (semantic queries like 'companies solving cold chain logistics with IoT') and Scavio for competitive intelligence (keyword queries like 'cold chain logistics software pricing 2026' across Google and Amazon). Exa found startups that never mentioned 'cold chain' explicitly, while Scavio returned the market pricing data Exa's semantic index missed.

Exa Semantic Search is relevant to Google. Scavio provides a unified API to access data from all of these platforms.

Traditional search APIs (Scavio, SerpAPI, Brave) return results based on keyword relevance, mimicking how Google and other search engines rank pages. Exa takes a fundamentally different approach: it uses neural embeddings to understand the semantic meaning of a query and matches it against an independently built index of web pages. This means Exa can find conceptually related pages even when they do not contain the exact query terms. Exa also returns full page content by default, not just titles and snippets. Pricing: Exa charges $5/1K requests with 1K free/month. This is comparable to Brave ($5/1K) and more expensive per query than Scavio ($0.005/credit, equivalent to $5/1K). The key tradeoff: Exa excels at discovery queries ('find startups doing X') where you want conceptually related results. Keyword-based APIs excel at specific queries ('best noise cancelling headphones 2026') where you want what Google's algorithm ranks highest. For most production use cases -- product search, competitive monitoring, price tracking, news monitoring -- keyword-based APIs deliver more relevant results because users think in keywords. Exa shines for research and discovery workflows where the goal is finding non-obvious connections.