Description

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:

1. Signing up at dashboard.exa.ai
2. Navigating to the API Keys section
3. 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

• n8n community nodes documentation
• Exa API documentation
• Exa API reference

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

License

MIT