Notion × Exa Case Study

How do you add web search capabilities to your internal search tools?

Research Mode in Notion AI was built to help teams go from information spread across multiple tools and the web to polished, shareable docs without ever leaving Notion. By connecting to both your workspace and the web, Research Mode acts like a personal analyst, pulling together trusted insights so you can move work forward with confidence.

Exa's research endpoint helps searches in Research Mode connect to the web, making sure you always have access to timely, relevant information, right alongside your team's knowledge and workflows. This foundation also paves the way for future agentic capabilities that handle more of the work for you.

To deliver truly comprehensive answers, Research Mode needed to augment Notion's internal and connected sources with high-quality, up-to-date web results. For Notion, these features for web search were top of mind:

High quality relevant search - high relevancy results from top sources

Customizability - offer search capabilities for content moderation and avoiding paywalled or low quality results

Low latency search - real time responses to user queries

Privacy focused search - ensuring data privacy benefits are passed on to Notion users

Notion required a web search partner that could seamlessly integrate with their existing infrastructure while maintaining the quality and performance standards users expect from Notion.

Exa is building search infrastructure for LLM's to connect AI tools to the web. We specialize in exactly the customized capabilities and user expectations that Notion requires for Research Mode.

LLM‑ready retrieval - High quality sources, accurate results and clean data outputs for ideal LLM processing

Custom outputs to search - Exa's search API allows you to filter out categories of content from the web that reduce relevancy and quality of results

Zero Data Retention - zdr is available across our search products. Since we built our search engine from scratch, unlike most providers we can ensure true data privacy.

Since launch, Notion Research Mode has leveraged Exa to process millions of web search queries monthly, supporting a growing base of users who expect fast, reliable, and high-quality research capabilities within their workflow. This foundation also sets the stage for Notion's evolution toward more advanced agentic capabilities that promise to transform how even more teams work.