Contents API

Just want working code?

Stop reading. Visit contents coding agent reference and copy paste to your agent.

What it is

/contents returns clean, structured content from any URL, handling JavaScript-rendered pages, PDFs, and complex layouts automatically. You pass in URLs and get back full page text, targeted highlights, LLM-generated summaries, or all three. It can also be used to crawl linked subpages to pull content from entire site sections in a single request. All contents features are also available in /search for returned URLs, at no extra charge up to 10 results per search ($1/1000 pages afterwards). We recommend using /search in this way instead of /contents for web search tool use cases.

Use /contents when you already know the URLs. If you are starting from a query and want Exa to find the pages first, start with Search.

Key Capabilities

Content Modes

Choose how you receive content, or combine them in a single request:

Mode	What You Get	Best For
Text	Full page content as clean markdown	Deep analysis, full context research
Highlights	Key excerpts relevant to your query	Agent workflows, factual lookups (10x fewer tokens)
Summary	LLM-generated abstract	Quick overviews, structured extraction with JSON schema

Subpage crawling

Automatically discover and extract content from linked pages within a site. Pass subpages: 10 and optionally subpageTarget: ["docs", "about"] to focus on relevant sections.

Content freshness

Control whether results come from cache or are freshly crawled with maxAgeHours:

Setting	Behavior
Omit (default)	Livecrawl only when no cache exists
`24`	Use cache if < 24 hours old, otherwise livecrawl
`0`	Always livecrawl (slowest, freshest)
`-1`	Cache only (fastest, may be stale)

Common use cases

Token-efficient info from an article

Get the most relevant excerpts without needing the full page.

result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://example.com/research-paper"],
  highlights={"query": "methodology and results"}
)

Structured outputs using summaries

Extract specific fields from any page using a JSON schema.

result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://example.com/company-page"],
  summary={
    "query": "Extract company information",
    "schema": {
      "type": "object",
      "properties": {
        "name": {"type": "string"},
        "industry": {"type": "string"},
        "founded": {"type": "number"}
      },
      "required": ["name", "industry"]
    }
  }
)

Crawl many pages from a website

Pull content from a docs site, targeting specific sections.

result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://docs.example.com"],
  subpages=15,
  subpage_target=["api", "models", "embeddings"],
  max_age_hours=24,
  text={"max_characters": 5000}
)

Human Quickstart

Get your API key from the Exa Dashboard, then set it as an environment variable:

macOS/Linux
Windows

export EXA_API_KEY="your-api-key"

setx EXA_API_KEY "your-api-key"

Install the SDK:

pip install exa-py

npm install exa-js

Then make your first request:

from exa_py import Exa

exa = Exa()

result = exa.get_contents(
  ["https://example.com/article"],
  highlights=True
)

import Exa from "exa-js";

const exa = new Exa();

const result = await exa.getContents(
  ["https://example.com/article"],
  {
    highlights: true
  }
);

curl -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/contents" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "urls": ["https://example.com/article"],
    "highlights": true
  }'

Search API - Find content on the web with natural language
Contents API Reference - Full API reference with all parameters
MCP Setup - Connect your AI assistant to Exa
SDKs - Python and JavaScript SDK docs

​What it is

​Key Capabilities

​Content Modes

​Subpage crawling

​Content freshness

​Common use cases

​Human Quickstart

​Next

What it is

Key Capabilities

Content Modes

Subpage crawling

Content freshness

Common use cases

Human Quickstart

Next