ceven

Exa

Turns the web into a structured database by extracting clean content, monitoring site changes, and generating citation backed answers for your workflows.

Try Exa in Ceven

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Why use Ceven?

  1. AI native Exa integration

    • Describe the outcome and Ceven picks the right Exa calls, fills the parameters, and checks the result.
    • Structured, agent friendly tool schemas so each call runs reliably instead of by guesswork.
    • Rich coverage for reading, writing, and querying your Exa data, across all 18 of its actions.

  2. Managed auth

    • Built in OAuth with automatic token refresh and rotation.
    • One place to manage, scope, and revoke Exa access.
    • Per user and per environment credentials instead of shared keys.

  3. Agent optimized design

    • Actions are tuned from real success and error rates so reliability climbs over time.
    • Full execution logs so you always know what ran in Exa, when, and on whose behalf.
    • The agent pauses and asks when Exa is unclear instead of plowing ahead.

  4. Enterprise grade security

    • Fine grained access so you control which agents and people can reach Exa.
    • Least privilege by default, read scopes first and only the writes a workflow needs.
    • A full audit trail of every Exa action to support review and sign off.

Supported tools

Every action Ceven's agents can run on Exa, and when to use it.

Generate answer
Use this to get a direct answer with citations for a natural language question based on web data.
Create import
Use this to initialize a data upload process into a specific webset.
Create monitor
Use this to schedule automated updates for a webset so you do not have to run it manually.
Create webset
Use this to configure a new webset with search and enrichment settings in one call.
Delete import
Use this to permanently remove an import job by its unique ID.
Delete webset
Use this to remove a webset and all associated items after confirming the ID.
Find similar
Use this to find web pages that are semantically similar to a provided URL.
Get contents
Pull configurable text and highlights from a list of document IDs or URLs.
Get event
Use this to pull the full details of a specific system event using its ID.
List events
Pull a paginated history of all events that have occurred in the system.
List imports
Pull and monitor the status of all import jobs for a specific webset.
List webhooks
Pull a list of all active webhooks configured for your websets.
Search
Perform a semantic web search using advanced filters or AI optimized prompts.
Update import
Modify the title or metadata of an existing import configuration.
Generate an answer
Generates a direct, citation backed answer to a clear natural language question or topic using exa's search, adept at both specific answers and detailed summaries for open ended queries.
Create a Monitor
Tool to create a new monitor. use when you need to schedule automated updates for a webset without manual runs.
Get contents from URLs or document IDs
Retrieves configurable text and highlights from a list of exa document ids or publicly accessible urls.

17 actions · scroll to see them all

Frequently asked questions

Standard search engines rely heavily on keyword matching and page rank. Exa uses a neural search approach where it embeds the entire web into a high dimensional space. This means when you search for a concept, Exa finds pages that are semantically related to that concept even if the exact words are not present. For a Ceven user, this means you can prompt the agent to find companies that solve a specific problem rather than just searching for a specific industry keyword. The result is a much higher signal to noise ratio for LLM workflows that require precise data extraction.
A webset is essentially a curated collection of web pages that you can manage as a single entity. In Ceven, you can create a webset to act as a focused knowledge base for your agent. For example, you can seed a webset with the top twenty blogs in your industry. You then set up a monitor so the agent knows when new content is published. When a change is detected, Ceven can trigger a workflow to summarize the new post and alert your team in Slack. It turns the chaotic web into a structured list of sources.
Exa retrieves publicly accessible content from the web. It cannot bypass authenticated paywalls or login screens that require a user account. If a website requires a subscription or a login to view the full text, Exa will generally only be able to retrieve the publicly visible metadata or the preview snippet. If your workflow depends on data behind a paywall, you will need to provide the content via a direct import or use a tool that has specific authorized access to that proprietary data source.
When you use the generate answer tool, Exa does not just provide a block of text. It returns a response where each claim is backed by a specific URL from its index. Ceven preserves these citations in the workflow output. This is critical for business users who need to verify the truthfulness of AI generated content. You can configure your workflow to include these links in a final report or a CRM note, allowing any human reviewer to click through to the original source and verify the information in real time.
Exa enforces rate limits based on your specific API tier. A common quirk is that the generate answer endpoint is significantly more expensive in terms of credits and has a lower rate limit than the standard search endpoint. If you build a high volume workflow that calls generate answer for every single lead, you may hit a 429 error. To avoid this, we recommend using the search tool to filter your list first and only calling the answer tool for the most relevant results to conserve your credits.
Yes. You can use the create import action to upload a file or a list of URLs into a webset. Once the import is initialized, Exa processes those pages and adds them to your indexed collection. This is useful when you already have a list of target accounts in a CSV and you want the agent to start monitoring them for updates. The agent can track the import status and notify you once the data is fully indexed and ready for semantic querying or enrichment.
The find similar tool uses the embedding of a target URL to find other pages that occupy a similar space in the vector index. Instead of looking for similar words, it looks for similar intent and content structure. For instance, if you provide a high quality landing page for a CRM tool, Exa will find other CRM landing pages even if they use different terminology. This is incredibly powerful for market mapping workflows where you have one great example of a competitor and want to find every other company doing something similar.
Exa is constantly indexing the web, but there is always a slight delay between a page being published and it appearing in the index. While it is much faster than traditional crawlers for specific queries, it is not a real time firehose like a social media API. However, by using the monitor tool on a specific webset, you can effectively track changes to known pages with very low latency. This allows you to build a near real time alert system for the most important pages in your competitive landscape.

Alternatives to Exa

Other tools that solve a similar problem. Ceven supports these too, so you can switch or run more than one at once.

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