As AI agents and LLMs move into production, developers need reliable, cost-effective web search APIs that go beyond keyword matching. The demand for semantic understanding, structured extraction, and real-time data feeding directly into AI systems has never been higher.

Exa pioneered embeddings-based semantic search for machines, understanding meaning rather than just keywords. This guide explores five alternatives that offer different approaches to AI-powered web search and data extraction.

Teams may explore alternatives when they need a fully open-source, self-hosted option, an all-in-one web data stack (search + scrape + extraction), predictable flat pricing, or parallel processing at scale.

Exa is an AI-powered search engine built specifically for machines. Unlike traditional search engines, Exa uses embeddings-based semantic searc to understand meaning rather than just matching keywords, making it ideal for feeding results directly into LLMs, AI agents, and RAG systems.

Main APIs:

• Search: Semantic queries that understand context and intent
• Contents: Retrieve clean, parsed HTML from search results
• Find Similar: Feed one URL, get 20 similar pages
• Answer: Summarized responses with citations
• Research: Automated deep research API with structured JSON
• Websets: Complex queries returning thousands of results (can take up to 1 hour)

Pricing: Free tier with 1,000 credits, then $49 for 8,000 credits. Credit consumption varies by query complexity. Enterprise pricing requires a sales contact.

Each alternative offers different approaches to AI-powered web search and data extraction.

Firecrawl takes a fundamentally different approach than Exa.

While Exa is search-first with extraction as a secondary feature, Firecrawl is extraction-first, built specifically for pulling clean, structured, LLM-ready data from websites at scale. It's also fully open source and can be self-hosted for teams that need full control over data and infrastructure.

Search and extract in one API call

Firecrawl combines search and extraction in one API call, providing a unified workflow.

With Exa, you search for pages, then make separate extraction calls. Firecrawl finds the pages and extracts their full content in a single call at one flat credit per page.

This approach means fewer API calls, simpler code, and predictable costs. Firecrawl's extraction engine returns structured, LLM-ready data without additional processing.

Read more about it here or see the full breakdown in Firecrawl vs. Exa.

Performance in independent benchmarks

In open-source scrape-evals testing 13 web scraping engines on 1,000 real URLs, our testing showed the following results:

• Coverage: Firecrawl 77.2% vs Exa 69.2% in our evaluation
• Quality (F1 score): Firecrawl 0.638 vs Exa 0.508 in our evaluation

The F1 score measures how much useful content you capture versus noise. Higher F1 generally means cleaner, more complete extraction, which can be valuable when feeding data into LLMs where context windows matter.

Built for extraction

Exa returns search snippets optimized for discovery. Firecrawl extracts complete, structured data from full pages.

You describe what you need in plain English (like "get product name, price, stock status, and customer reviews"), and Firecrawl's extraction engine pulls exactly that data. No CSS selectors, no XPath, no parsing logic required.

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp
from pydantic import BaseModel, Field
from typing import List, Optional
 
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")
 
class Company(BaseModel):
    name: str = Field(description="Company name")
    contact_email: Optional[str] = Field(None, description="Contact email")
    employee_count: Optional[str] = Field(None, description="Number of employees")
 
class CompaniesSchema(BaseModel):
    companies: List[Company] = Field(description="List of companies")
 
result = app.agent(
    prompt="Find YC W24 dev tool companies and get their contact info and team size",
    schema=CompaniesSchema
)
 
print(result.data)
 

When a site changes its HTML structure, your extraction keeps working because the AI adapts automatically.

Open source and self-hosted

Firecrawl is fully open source and can be self-hosted, which is useful for teams with data residency requirements, security constraints, or cost optimization needs at scale.

Handles complex sites automatically

Many sites hide content behind "Load More" buttons, require form submissions, or spread data across paginated views. The Firecrawl Agent handles these interactions automatically. It clicks buttons, fills search fields, navigates pagination, and much more.

This means you can extract data from JavaScript-heavy single-page applications, e-commerce sites with infinite scroll, all without writing custom automation code for each site.

Agent + Intelligent Waterfall enrichment

Firecrawl /agent searches, navigates, and gathers even the most complex websites, finding data in hard-to-reach places and discovering information anywhere on the internet.

It accomplishes in a few minutes what would take a human many hours. /agent finds and extracts your data, wherever it lives on the web.

Firecrawl's /agent endpoint supports Intelligent Waterfall enrichment, so it tries fast retrieval first and only escalates to deeper research when needed. For batch workflows, Parallel Agents let you run hundreds or thousands of /agent queries at once—see the Parallel Agents launch.

Firecrawl isn't a single-purpose tool. It offers five complementary endpoints:

• Scrape: Convert any URL into markdown or JSON
• Search: Find pages and extract their content immediately
• Agent: Gather data wherever it lives on the web with or without URLs
• Map: Discover site structure in seconds
• Crawl: Navigate entire sites without sitemaps

Consider Firecrawl when extraction quality and depth matter. In our benchmarks, Firecrawl achieved 77.2% coverage and 0.638 F1 quality versus Exa's 69.2% coverage and 0.508 F1.

Firecrawl handles JavaScript rendering automatically at no extra cost, navigates pagination via Agent, and offers predictable flat-rate pricing. It's also fully open source and can be self-hosted for data residency, compliance, or infrastructure control. It may be well-suited for production applications requiring reliability, self-service scaling, and real-time results.

Tavily is a search API built specifically for AI agents and LLMs, with a focus on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. Like Exa, it's designed for machines rather than humans, but takes a more straightforward approach with transparent pricing and faster response times.

Transparent, predictable pricing

Tavily charges a flat $0.008 per credit with clear pricing tiers starting at $30/month. Tavily's costs are predictable, allowing you to know exactly what you'll pay before making a request.

For a full feature-by-feature breakdown, see Firecrawl vs. Tavily.

Native LangChain integration

Tavily is particularly popular in the LangChain community with native integrations that make adding real-time web search to your agent straightforward. The setup is simpler than Exa's semantic search configuration.

• Search: Real-time web queries with AI-optimized results
• Extract: Pull full content from URLs with JavaScript rendering
• Crawl: Navigate entire websites using natural language instructions
• Map: Discover website structure before extraction

Choose Tavily when you need predictable costs for RAG applications and faster response times than Exa offers. It's ideal for prototyping AI agents, building chatbots with web search capabilities, and applications where you need consistent performance without hour-long wait times.

However, note that Tavily is also search-first. For deep structured extraction beyond snippets, you'll still need a dedicated scraping tool like Firecrawl. Checkout our detailed comparison on Firecrawl vs. Tavily.

Read our detailed Tavily alternatives comparison for more.

Perplexity Sonar API combines live web crawling with an in-house LLM to deliver cited answers in one API call. Instead of just returning search results like Exa, Perplexity searches, processes, and summarizes information with source citations.

Answers, not just links

Perplexity doesn't just find relevant pages. It reads them, synthesizes the information, and returns a coherent answer with citations. Perfect for applications where users need answers, not a list of URLs to read themselves.

Built-in citations

Every answer includes source links, making it ideal for applications where verifiable information matters like legal research, financial analysis, healthcare queries, or academic work.

Simpler than semantic search

While Exa requires understanding embeddings-based semantic search, Perplexity works like a traditional chatbot. Ask a question, get an answer. No need to learn about vector databases or semantic matching.

Choose Perplexity when you need fast, summarized answers with citations rather than raw search results. It's ideal for building conversational AI applications, research assistants, or knowledge bases where users expect direct answers backed by sources.

The tradeoff is dual pricing complexity (token costs plus per-request fees) compared to Exa's credit system, and you lose Exa's semantic search capabilities for discovering conceptually similar content.

Linkup is an AI search engine optimized for LLMs and AI agents, with a focus on sourcing data from trusted, authoritative sources. It ranks #1 on OpenAI's SimpleQA factuality benchmark, positioning itself as the world's most accurate search for AI applications.

Two-tier search approach

Linkup offers both fast fact retrieval (Standard) and comprehensive deep intelligence searches (Deep). Standard search handles quick queries like "What is Microsoft's Q3 2024 revenue?" while Deep search uses chain-of-thought reasoning for complex questions like "What are Apple and Samsung's strategy differences for 2026?"

Company enrichment capabilities

Unlike Exa's general search focus, Linkup specializes in enriching company profiles with market and competitive intelligence. It can automatically pull product information, target markets, ICP ratings, and customer testimonials, making it powerful for sales and GTM teams.

Transparent pricing with free tier

Linkup charges a straightforward €5 per 1,000 standard searches or €50 per 1,000 deep searches. The free tier includes €5 worth of queries every month, providing predictable pricing.

Linkup integrates natively with CrewAI, LangChain, Make, n8n, and Zapier, making it easy to add to existing AI workflows without custom code.

Choose Linkup when you need verifiable facts from trusted sources rather than broad semantic discovery. It's ideal for business intelligence applications, company research, competitive analysis, and GTM automation where data accuracy is critical.

The tradeoff is that Linkup doesn't offer web crawling capabilities, so you'll still need a separate tool like Firecrawl for extracting structured data beyond search results.

Brave Search API stands out with its own independent search index of 30+ billion pages. Unlike some competitors that may rely on Bing or Google, Brave crawls and indexes the web itself. This may be a consideration given Bing's API changes affecting some search services.

Privacy-first architecture

SOC 2 Type II certified with no user tracking. May be well-suited for applications where privacy matters or where you're handling sensitive queries. Brave reports not building user profiles or selling data, which may be relevant for healthcare, legal, or financial applications.

Up to 5 snippets per result

Get more context from each search result, useful for training foundation models or building comprehensive RAG systems. More content per result means fewer API calls for the same information depth.

Search Goggles for customization

Customize search behavior by discarding specific domains or re-ranking results. Build custom search experiences tailored to your use case without forking an entire search engine. This level of control isn't available with Exa's fixed semantic ranking.

• Web Search: General queries across Brave's full index
• AI Grounding: Optimized results for LLM context
• Image, Video, News: Vertical-specific search
• Suggest: Autocomplete and query suggestions
• Spellcheck: Query correction

Choose Brave for privacy-centric applications where data handling and compliance matter. If you're building tools for sensitive industries, handling confidential research, or serving privacy-conscious users, Brave's architecture and certifications provide guarantees Exa doesn't emphasize.

The tradeoff is that Brave returns raw JSON SERPs rather than AI-optimized semantic results.

For a deeper look at how Brave compares to other search APIs, see our Brave Search API alternatives guide.

Exa pioneered semantic search for AI with embeddings-based discovery. When your application needs deep extraction, transparent pricing, or different performance characteristics, these alternatives offer specialized approaches for those use cases.

If you need structured data extraction from specific websites, Firecrawl's purpose-built engine provides extraction-first architecture with predictable pricing. At $83 for 100K pages, Firecrawl offers cost-effective scaling with an Agent that handles JavaScript, pagination, and more automatically. For a deeper feature-by-feature comparison, see Firecrawl vs. Exa.

Try Firecrawl free with 500 credits (no card required) or explore the docs to see how extraction-first architecture works in practice.