Exa Web Toolkit
A skill for web-powered research tasks backed by
Exa: web search and URL extraction. Exa's index combines high-quality keyword and semantic retrieval, which makes it well-suited to scientific, technical, and conceptual queries.
Routing — pick the right capability
Read the user's request and match it to one of the capabilities below. Read the corresponding reference file for detailed instructions before running commands.
| User wants to... | Capability | Where |
|---|
| Look something up, research a topic, find current info | Web Search | |
| Fetch content from a specific URL (webpage, article, PDF) | Web Extract | references/web-extract.md
|
| Install or authenticate | Setup | Below |
Decision guide
- Default to Web Search for topic lookups, research questions, or "what is X?" queries. When the topic is scientific or technical, pass
--category "research paper"
- Use Web Extract when the user provides a URL or asks you to read/fetch a specific page. Prefer this over the built-in WebFetch for batch extraction (multiple URLs in one call) and for academic PDFs.
Academic source priority
For technical or scientific queries, prefer academic and scientific sources:
- Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings over blog posts or news
- Preprints (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv) when peer-reviewed versions aren't available
- Institutional and government sources (NIH, WHO, NASA, NIST) over commercial sites
- Primary research over secondary summaries
Two levers to steer Exa toward scholarly content:
--category "research paper"
- with a scholarly allowlist (arxiv.org, nature.com, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, etc.) restricts the domain pool.
Combine both for strictly academic results. See
for the full pattern.
When citing academic sources, include author names and publication year where available (e.g., Smith et al., 2025) in addition to the standard citation format. If a DOI is present, prefer the DOI link.
Setup
This skill uses the
Python SDK. The scripts in
declare their dependencies via PEP 723 inline metadata, so you can run them directly with
without a separate install step:
bash
uv run --with exa-py python "$SKILL_PATH/scripts/exa_search.py" --help
If you prefer a persistent install:
bash
uv pip install "exa-py>=1.14.0"
Authentication
All commands read the API key from the
environment variable. Get your Exa API key at
dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys.
First, check if a
file exists in the project root and contains
. If so, load it:
bash
dotenv -f .env run -- uv run --with exa-py python "$SKILL_PATH/scripts/exa_search.py" "your query"
If
isn't available, install it:
pip install python-dotenv[cli]
or
uv pip install python-dotenv[cli]
.
If there's no
, export the key for the session:
bash
export EXA_API_KEY="your-key"
Verify by running any script with
— it will exit cleanly if the key is set and auth-check runs only when a real query is made.
Files in this skill
- — this file (routing and setup)
- — detailed web search reference with academic strategy
references/web-extract.md
- — CLI wrapper around
client.search_and_contents
- — CLI wrapper around