WRITTEN BY

Will Bryk

PUBLISHED ON

Aug 18, 2025

ZDR for every search product

Today we’re excited to announce that Exa now offers Zero Data Retention (ZDR) for each of our search products -- search, answer, and deep research.

ZDR is the golden standard for enterprises that require full data privacy. For a search provider to offer ZDR, it must never store user query data, neither in the main service nor any subprocessors.

Secrets of the search world

It’s a little known secret in the search ecosystem that most search providers can’t actually offer ZDR.

That’s because most search providers crawl Google under the hood. When your query goes to the search provider, it’s routed to some anonymous server across the globe running Google in a browser, and the Google results are sent back to the search provider. Google of course is a consumer search engine that trains on user queries, so they don’t have ZDR. Therefore, any search provider crawling Google under the hood as a subprocessor cannot have ZDR.

To offer ZDR, you need your own independent search engine.

The Exa team was crazy enough to spend four years researching and developing our very own search engine from scratch. We crawl the web, train special AI search models, and design massive databases to serve them.

That’s a fancy way of saying we’re able to serve accurate results to customers while ensuring that each query stays within our ZDR system. After the search, the query data is then deleted.

Two new endpoints

Exa has offered ZDR search for a while. That’s a big reason why so many customers came to us from the Bing deprecation. Many of these were Fortune 500s and financial firms who take data privacy very seriously.

Today, Exa is announcing ZDR for two more of our endpoints:
/answer endpoint, which offers AI summaries powered by our search
/research endpoint, which offers deep research reports, similar to OpenAI’s deep research

We’re particularly excited to enable the deep research use case. Now you can get a full AI analysis involving sensitive topics, without worrying about where the data’s going.

Today’s announcement is just another step toward Exa’s goal of giving companies full access to the world’s information however they want it – powerfully, quickly, and, now, fully privately.