The world’s fastest search API
AI systems need faster search than humans. They now have it.
AI systems need faster search than humans. They now have it.
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PUBLISHED ON
Jul 29, 2025
Today we're introducing Exa Fast - the fastest search API in the world. Exa Fast is a streamlined version of Exa search with p50 latency below 425ms.
We compared Exa with Brave and Google Serp (tools that scrape Google). Exa Fast was fastest by over 30%. All other search API providers wrap one of these tools under the hood and therefore had higher latencies, and so were not included in the graph.
We benchmarked all providers on thousands of random queries from a datacenter in us-west-1 (northern california). The network latency for Exa, for example, was roughly 50ms.
Exa is built for AI systems to search the web. Latency is important to humans, but it’s even more important to AIs.
Fast web grounded responses: Search is now often integrated into LLM calls to know about the news or for precise knowledge. Think SearchGPT or Perplexity summaries. Unfortunately, search + LLM calls are often annoyingly slow for humans. Fast search is critical so that the search + LLM latency is fast enough.
Agentic workflows: AI agents make lots of search calls. Think deep research or cursor agents. If a deep research agent makes 50 search calls and each one is 200ms faster, that’s 10 seconds of savings for users.
Low-latency AI products: Some AI products are very latency sensitive. Think AI voice companions. For these tools, every millisecond matters. Web search is currently one of the biggest latency bottlenecks for these tools, and this will get worse as LLM latency rapidly decreases.
You can only build the fastest search API in the world if you've built your own search engine from scratch - i.e. you can't be a wrapper.
Many search APIs actually wrap Google under the hood. Meaning there are browsers in server farms that take user queries, process them in Google, and serve the results. This takes over 700ms P50, and so any search API that wraps Google has a minimum 700ms P50.
In contrast, we built our tech from scratch. We crawl the web, train models to search over it, and developed our own vector database. It took years for us to build this. But it's paying off. By owning every part of the stack, we're uniquely able to control our own search destiny, and therefore can optimize for things like latency.
The world is changing and search needs to change too. As the world advances toward super fast autonomous agents, we'll need search that can keep up.
We're building search for a future where agents make dozens of searches, where every AI interaction is informed by the best and most up-to-date world knowledge.
Faster search will make this future come… faster.
Test it out at dashboard.exa.ai by selecting Search Type → Exa Fast. Docs here.
If you think 425ms is not fast enough, we agree. Come help build the infra to make it way faster, we're hiring :)
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