Install guide and config at curatedmcp.com

Exa MCP: Semantic search for AI agents that actually understands what you're looking for

Traditional keyword search is dead weight for AI workflows. Exa MCP connects your Claude, Cursor, or Windsurf agent to neural search — meaning your AI can find conceptually related content, research papers by similarity, and discover competitors doing the same thing as your target company, even without keyword overlap.

This is the search layer for research-intensive AI tasks. Exa understands meaning. It filters by date. It knows academic papers from GitHub repos from news articles. Your agent stops guessing keyword combinations and starts finding what actually matters.

What It Does

Exa MCP gives your AI agent a search engine built for semantic understanding, not keyword matching. Instead of phrase-matching, it finds content by concept — so a query like "companies doing Figma but for 3D modeling" actually returns relevant startups, not just pages mentioning those words together.

Key capabilities:

• Neural search: Find content by meaning across the entire web
• Similarity matching: "Show me papers like this arXiv abstract" — instant conceptual discovery
• Research mode: Multi-source synthesis for comprehensive answers
• Temporal precision: Filter results to specific date ranges (find what was written before 2023)
• Domain targeting: Search academic papers, GitHub repos, news, or technical docs specifically
• Structured extraction: Get highlighted passages and clean content, not just links

For developers, this unlocks AI agents that can actually do research, competitive analysis, and discovery without you hand-crafting search queries.

How to Install

npx -y exa-mcp-server

Add to your Claude Desktop configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "exa-mcp": {
      "command": "npx -y exa-mcp-server"
    }
  }
}

Grab your free Exa API key at exa.ai, set it as an environment variable, and you're live.

Real-World Use Cases

• Competitor research: Ask Claude to find companies building AI-powered design tools like Figma, get semantically matched results instead of keyword noise
• Research synthesis: "Find academic papers on federated learning from the last two years, then summarize the consensus" — your agent pulls relevant papers and synthesizes findings
• Documentation discovery: Help Cursor find implementation examples across GitHub and technical blogs without exact keyword matches — find the pattern, not the phrase

Full install guides for Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, and more at CuratedMCP.