Package Information
Documentation
n8n-nodes-exa-official
An n8n community node for the Exa API: web search, content extraction, and research agents. This node is usable both as a regular node and as a tool for an n8n AI Agent.
n8n is a fair-code licensed workflow automation platform.
Installation
Operations
Credentials
Compatibility
Usage
Resources
Installation
Follow the installation guide in the n8n community nodes documentation.
Operations
Search — POST /search
Semantic web search. Search types: auto, instant, fast, deep-lite, deep, deep-reasoning.
Output formats:
- Results — the ranked list of pages.
- Text — a single written answer synthesised from the results.
- Structured (JSON Schema) — JSON matching a schema you provide.
Options include category (company, publication, news, personal site, financial report, people), domain and text filters, published-date ranges, additional queries for the deep types, moderation, a system prompt and user location. Content extraction (text, highlights, summary, links, images, maxAgeHours, subpages) is available on every search.
Contents — POST /contents
Fetch cleaned text, highlights, summaries, links and images for a list of URLs. Per-URL statuses are merged onto the results, so pages that failed to crawl arrive as items carrying status and error instead of silently disappearing.
Answer — POST /answer
A grounded answer with citations, optionally as JSON matching a schema, optionally including the full text of each citation.
Agent — /agent/runs
Multi-step research, list building and enrichment.
- Create Run — start a run, optionally waiting for it to finish by streaming server-sent events or by polling. Supports effort, system prompt, structured output, input rows, metadata, connector data sources and continuation from a previous run.
- Get Run — status and output of a run.
- Get Many Runs — recent runs, with pagination.
- Get Run Events — list a run's events, or hold an SSE connection open and collect them until the run finishes.
- Cancel Run — stop a queued or running run.
Credentials
To use this node, you need an Exa API key. You can obtain one by:
- Signing up at dashboard.exa.ai
- Navigating to the API Keys section
- Creating a new API key
Add the API key to your n8n credentials as "Exa API".
Compatibility
- Requires n8n 1.60.0 or newer, and Node.js 20.15 or newer.
- Tested against n8n 2.32.
Usage
As an AI Agent tool
Set the node's connection to an AI Agent and it appears as a tool. Any parameter can be filled by the model with {{ $fromAI('query', 'what to search for', 'string') }}, which makes Search and Answer useful as web-grounding tools for agents.
Waiting for an agent run
Wait for Completion holds the workflow until the run reaches a terminal state:
- Stream keeps one server-sent events connection open and returns the finished run (optionally with every event that led to it).
- Poll re-requests the run on an interval.
For long runs, turn Wait for Completion off, store the returned id, and follow the run later with Get Run — the run keeps going server-side.
Resources
Development
To work on this node locally:
# Install dependencies
npm install
# Build the node
npm run build
npm run lint
# Install the node in your n8n instance
mkdir -p ~/.n8n/custom && cd ~/.n8n/custom
npm init -y
npm install /path/to/n8n-integration
n8n start