Introducing Exa Places: Search 211M Places with Structured Data
Today we're adding 211 million places to Exa's index. Your AI agents can now search restaurants, museums, parks, shops, and local businesses around the world, with structured data including opening hours, ratings, and phone numbers.
AI agents and personal assistants need up-to-date business data to help users find the right places to go and take action in the real world. Exa Places is available to use today across all our endpoints at no additional charge.
Data your agents can use
Exa Places includes restaurants and cafés, hotels, retailers, healthcare providers, professional services, cultural attractions, outdoor spaces, and more.
For example, user might query Exa Places for:
Ramen restaurants in the SF Mission open Friday at 7pm with an upscale vibe
Museums in Mexico City with reviews mentioning activities for children
Independent bookstores with great review scores in Brooklyn
Exa understands the geolocation in your query and returns relevant businesses in that area.
Results returned from the Exa Places index include structured data like:
- Names, categories, addresses, and coordinates
- Opening hours and operating status
- Phone numbers and websites
- Ratings
The structured fields are efficient for giving agents information they can work with directly. A sample response:
When accuracy matters
Personal assistants
People ask assistants about places: where to eat, which pharmacy is open, what hotel is near the stadium. With Exa Places, the assistant gets each place's status, hours, and phone number in the same search call it uses for the web. It can check if a place is open before recommending.
Go-to-market operations
When teams sell to local businesses, they need lists that are current, like every dental practice in a metro area, every independent gym in Texas, or all the physical therapy clinics in Phoenix. Maybe it can be done by hand, but it’s onerous and prone to error. With Exa Places, a search like these returns the businesses with phone numbers, websites, and more. The agent can use the data to kick off automated workflows. With Exa Agent Ultra, the list can return every single match.
Market research
Analysts sizing a market or choosing a site need accurate counts. How many coffee shops operate within a mile of a planned location? Which towns in the state have no urgent care clinic? It’s a painstaking effort if a person tries to do this with web search. Exa Places makes it fast and easy to get current counts of places matching virtually any criteria.
Higher quality results
Across 400 queries, we compared Exa Fast, Perplexity Search, and Parallel Advanced on finding businesses with correct metadata.
We measured F1, which balances precision and recall for businesses returned with correct metadata (opening hours, phone numbers, location).
| Provider | F1 |
|---|---|
| Exa Fast | 0.800 |
| Perplexity Search | 0.529 |
| Parallel Advanced | 0.333 |
Exa Fast achieved a 51% higher F1 score than Perplexity Search and a 140% higher F1 score than Parallel Advanced.
Quality matters for agents. Missing a relevant place limits the options an agent can consider. Returning the wrong address or hours can make an otherwise good recommendation unusable.
Start building
Exa Places is live in the search API for all users at no additional cost. Get started in the developer dashboard.
