A workflow for using Exa Search, a semantic web-search service that finds and ranks relevant pages, with filters and optional extracted text.

Use it for open-ended web research, competitor discovery, finding recent information, and locating research papers or pages for deeper follow-up.

It helps an agent research broad topics, competitors, news, people, or papers when it does not already have specific URLs to inspect.

exa-search — Skill for Claude Code by MoizIbnYousaf

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add MoizIbnYousaf/marketing-cli --skill exa-search

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MoizIbnYousaf/marketing-cli

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install marketing-cli, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 88 skills, 9 commands, 1 hook, 2 MCP servers.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/moizibnyousaf/marketing-cli/exa-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/moizibnyousaf/marketing-cli/exa-search)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/moizibnyousaf/marketing-cli/exa-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/moizibnyousaf/marketing-cli/exa-search/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/moizibnyousaf/marketing-cli/exa-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/moizibnyousaf/marketing-cli/exa-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 120 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,725 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 10 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Data Exfiltration · line 29
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 38
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 45
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 58
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 74
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 97
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 110
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 219
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 259
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
medium Data Exfiltration · line 219
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.

Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00120	$0.03725
Opus 5	$0.00060	$0.01862
Sonnet 5	$0.00024	$0.00745
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00373

Measured 9d ago against content hash 87ee974b7248, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

exa-search scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -sS -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/search" \

skills/exa-search/SKILL.md · 321 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 321 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

On Activation

Read brand/positioning.md, brand/competitors.md, and brand/landscape.md if present. Use them to sharpen queries and exclusions. All optional - works at zero brand context.
Confirm Exa auth: Exa MCP connected, or EXA_API_KEY set (mktg doctor --json --fields integrations). If neither, stop and surface: get a key at https://dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys then export EXA_API_KEY=....
Prefer MCP tools when present; otherwise use the cURL examples below.
After discovery, chain firecrawl or exa-contents only when a known URL needs deeper extraction.

Exa Search

Requires API key: Get one at https://dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys

Header: x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY

Use POST https://api.exa.ai/search for semantic web retrieval, ranked results, and optional result-level extraction in one raw HTTP call. Start with type: "auto" for general retrieval. Add contents only when the caller needs page text, highlights, summaries, freshness-controlled crawling, subpages, or extracted links.

Quick Start (cURL)

Basic search

curl -sS -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/search" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "query": "latest developments in LLMs",
    "type": "auto",
    "numResults": 10
  }'

Search with highlights

curl -sS -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/search" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "query": "latest developments in LLMs",
    "type": "auto",
    "numResults": 5,
    "contents": {
      "highlights": true
    }
  }'

With filters and freshness

curl -sS -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/search" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "query": "AI regulation policy updates",
    "type": "auto",
    "category": "news",
    "numResults": 10,
    "includeDomains": ["reuters.com", "bbc.com"],
    "startPublishedDate": "2025-01-01",
    "contents": {
      "text": {
        "maxCharacters": 2000
      },
      "maxAgeHours": 24,
      "livecrawlTimeout": 12000
    }
  }'

Read the full file on GitHub · 321 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

9d ago First seen · 321 lines · 120 tokens per session scan A 87ee974b7248

Subscribe to this mod's changes

exa-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository MoizIbnYousaf/marketing-cli (31 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 3,725 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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