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Exa vs You.com

Exa scores higher on the AgentReady, 92/100 against 66/100. They differ on 13 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.

You.com. Provider of web search APIs for AI agents and LLMs, offering real-time search, content extraction, and grounded answer generation.

Where Exa is ahead

Exa passes clear product positioning, and You.com 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. You.com misses those.

And on adopt, programmatic credential creation. You.com misses it.

Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, rate-limit behavior predictable and observable execution. You.com misses those.

Where You.com is ahead

You.com passes no mandatory sales call and agent-compatible signup flow, and Exa does not. That is adopt, whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop.

What neither does

Both fail 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; You.com misses clear product positioning.

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

Adopt. You.com leads 90 to 81. Exa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow; You.com misses programmatic credential creation.

Operate. Exa leads 88 to 41. Exa misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support; You.com misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, observable execution.

Pricing

Exa starts at $0 (free tier with credits) and has a free tier. You.com 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 You.com. Alternatives to each: Exa, You.com.

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