Tools & keys · Search
Exa setup
Search by meaning, great for finding pages like the ones that already work.
Optional
Updated
Free tier
At the time of writing, Exa includes a free monthly credit (about $10, roughly 1,400 searches) with no card on file.checked September 2026
Larvabot's cap
Stops at 1,200 a month (free: 1,400). Change it in Settings → Free-quota guard.Fallback position
#3 of 9 for search. See the orderWhat it does
Exa is a neural search engine: instead of matching keywords, it finds pages whose content is similar to what you describe.
- Finding more blogs and list posts in the same niche as your best leads
- A third search provider when Tavily and Linkup are used up
Get set up
- Sign up at dashboard.exa.ai
- Copy your API key into Settings → Search → Exa API key
Where it goes
In the dashboard, open Settings and find the Search section. Secret values are encrypted before they're saved and only their last four characters are ever shown again.
Settings → Search
Exa API keyencrypted
EXA_API_KEY••••••••••••
Staying free
Larvabot caps Exa at 1,200 searches a month and asks for short highlights only, which keeps each search cheap.
How the quota guard works →Fallback order
For search, Larvabot tries these in order and skips any that aren't set up, are out of free quota or are busy.
- 1Tavily
- 2Linkup
- 3Exa
- 4Brave Search API
- 5SearXNG (your server)
- 6Larvabot search server
- 7Serper (Google results)
- 8Jina Search
- 9DuckDuckGo HTML
More search tools
Curious why Exa made the cut? Exa in the free stack →