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Brave Search vs Exa

Exa scores higher on the AgentReady, 92/100 against 58/100. They differ on 14 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Brave Search. Brave Search is a private, independent search engine that serves fast, accurate results from its own independent index of the Web, with AI answers and zero profiling.

Exa. Exa is a custom search engine built for AIs, offering an API to search the largest index of public web and private information.

Where Exa is ahead

Exa passes public docs discoverable, llms.txt published and llms-full.txt / full agent docs, and Brave Search does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented and limits / constraints documented. Brave Search misses those.

And on adopt, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request and copyable quickstart. Brave Search misses those.

Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors and rate-limit behavior predictable. Brave Search misses those.

What neither does

Both fail no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, retry behavior documented, idempotency support. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Exa leads 100 to 73. Brave Search misses public docs discoverable, llms.txt published, llms-full.txt / full agent docs; Exa misses nothing.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Exa leads 100 to 46. Brave Search misses openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Exa misses nothing.

Adopt. Exa leads 81 to 60. Brave Search misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart; Exa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow.

Operate. Exa leads 88 to 53. Brave Search misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable; Exa misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support.

Pricing

Brave Search starts at $4 per 1,000 requests and has a free tier. Exa starts at $0 (free tier with credits) and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Exa clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Brave Search and Exa. Alternatives to each: Brave Search, Exa.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["brave", "exa"]}