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Exa vs Olostep

Exa scores higher on the AgentReady, 92/100 against 63/100. They differ on 11 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

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

Olostep. Olostep is web data infrastructure for AI, providing an API for web agentic search, scraping and crawling.

Where Exa is ahead

Exa passes search discoverable, and Olostep does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided and errors and status codes documented. Olostep misses those.

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

Finally, on operate, machine-readable errors and rate-limit behavior predictable. Olostep 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 87. Exa misses nothing; Olostep misses search discoverable.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Exa leads 100 to 38. Exa misses nothing; Olostep misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.

Adopt. Exa leads 81 to 62. Exa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow; Olostep misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart.

Operate. Exa leads 88 to 65. Exa misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support; Olostep misses machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable.

Pricing

Exa starts at $0 (free tier with credits) and has a free tier. Olostep does not publish one 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: Exa and Olostep. Alternatives to each: Exa, Olostep.

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