The Research API offers two advanced agentic researcher models.

Model Capabilities & Recommendations

Both models are fundamentally agentic researchers: they break down your instructions, search the web, extract and reason over facts, and return structured answers with citations.

  • exa-research is highly adaptive, adjusting its approach to the difficulty of your request. It is recommended for most use cases.
  • exa-ultra provides the highest reasoning capability and excels at the most complex, multi-step research tasks.

Recommendation:

  • Use exa-research for most research and Q&A tasks.
  • Use exa-ultra for highly complex or nuanced research that requires advanced reasoning.

Latency Benchmarks

The following table summarizes typical completion times for each model. Times are approximate.

Modelp50 Time (seconds)p90 Time (seconds)
exa-research2040
exa-ultra3580