Exa has released Exa 3.0, scoring 80 on the Artificial Analysis Search Index in Dynamic Highlights mode, tying with Perplexity Search for the #1 spot

@ExaAILabs has released a new Dynamic Highlights mode to its Search API. Given a search query and its results, Dynamic Highlights determines how much text to return from each page within a shared budget

We benchmarked two Exa search types with Dynamic Highlights ahead of release: an upgraded auto mode, which balances search quality and speed, and a new lite mode, optimized for lower cost and latency. Both were evaluated using our Stirrup agent harness and GPT-5.6 Luna (medium) as the agent model

Key benchmarking results for Exa Search with Dynamic Highlights:

➤ Ties for #1 on the Artificial Analysis Search Index: Exa Search (auto, Dynamic Highlights) scores 80, level with Perplexity Search (medium) in the #1 spot, while Exa Search (lite, Dynamic Highlights) scores 79. On DeepSearchQA, auto (85.6 F1) and lite (84.9 F1) rank 1st and 2nd respectively, 4 to 5 points ahead of Perplexity Search (medium, 80.8)

➤ Reduces search calls and token usage: Exa Search (auto, Dynamic Highlights) uses 7.6 searches per task, the fewest of any Search API on the leaderboard, down from 9.4 with standard highlights. Tokens per task fall 47%, from 299k to 157k

➤ Reduces cost per task by 21%: Exa Search (auto, Dynamic Highlights) costs $0.066 per task, compared to $0.083 with standard highlights. Lite costs $0.044 per task, with both sitting on the cost vs. capability Pareto frontier. Exa Search is priced at $7 per 1k searches for auto and $4 per 1k searches for lite