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Overview

Endpoint: POST https://api.exa.ai/search with "category": "people" What it searches: 1B+ public professional profiles aggregated from LinkedIn, company pages, and other sources. Index refreshed weekly. Semantic search over structured attributes (role, skill, company, location, seniority). Natural language queries return relevance-ranked people results via API. For creating lists or enriching over many people at scale, use Websets.

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Minimal Working Example

curl -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/search" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"query": "senior ML engineers at fintech companies", "category": "people", "contents": {"highlights": {"maxCharacters": 4000}}}'

from exa_py import Exa
exa = Exa(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
result = exa.search("senior ML engineers at fintech companies", category="people", contents={"highlights": {"max_characters": 4000}})

import Exa from "exa-js";
const exa = new Exa("YOUR_API_KEY");
const result = await exa.search("senior ML engineers at fintech companies", { category: "people", contents: { highlights: { maxCharacters: 4000 } } });

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Parameter Restrictions

The people category does not support the following parameters. Using them returns a 400 error:
Unsupported ParameterWorkaround
startPublishedDateNot available. People profiles don’t have publish dates.
endPublishedDateNot available.
excludeDomainsNot available.
includeDomainsNot available.

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Supported Parameters

ParameterTypeNotes
querystringNatural language. Supports role, skill, company, location, seniority.
categorystringMust be "people".
typestring"auto" recommended. "deep" and "deep-reasoning" also work.
numResultsinteger1–100. Default 10.
contentsobjecttext, highlights, summary, all nested under contents.

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Query Patterns

By role and company: 
"product managers at Microsoft"
"enterprise sales reps from Salesforce in EMEA"
By skill set: 
"machine learning engineer with PyTorch experience"
"full-stack developer React and Node.js"
By seniority and location: 
"VP Engineering AI infrastructure San Francisco"
"CTO at fintech startups in New York"
Composite: 
"senior data scientists at Series B healthcare companies in Boston"
"DevOps engineers with Kubernetes experience at Fortune 500 companies"

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Common Mistakes

WrongCorrect
excludeDomains: [...] with category: "people"Remove excludeDomains. Not supported for people. Returns 400.
startPublishedDate: "2025-01-01" with category: "people"Remove date filters. Not supported for people. Returns 400.
Missing category: "people"Without category, the search runs against the general web index, not the people index. Always include "category": "people".

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Patterns and Gotchas

  • Always set category: "people". Without it, you search the general web index and won’t get structured people results.
  • Use highlights for agent workflows. People profiles are dense. Highlights extract the most relevant career details without flooding your context window.
  • Natural language is the only filter. Since date filters, text filters, and domain filters aren’t supported, encode all constraints in your query string.
  • Python SDK uses snake_case. numResults → num_results, maxCharacters → max_characters.
  • Combine with deep search for enrichment. Use type: "deep" with outputSchema to extract structured fields (name, title, company, location) from people results.