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ExaAI search crawler

ExaSearchBot

ExaSearchBot is a crawler for Exa’s search engine. Exa says its purpose is search and retrieval: connecting people and applications to your content and sending them back to your site.

Needed to be found in its search index.

Get the robots.txt ruleExa documentation
Is ExaSearchBot allowed on your site?
  • ExaSearchBotSearch
    Not checked

Reads your live robots.txt and applies the same rules these crawlers use. Nothing is stored.

robots.txt token
ExaSearchBot
Follows robots.txt
Yes, documented
Seen on
Not measured
Last checked
17 September 2026

Should you block ExaSearchBot?

Not if you want to be found. Blocking it can remove your pages from results that Exa serves to the AI tools and agents built on its index.

robots.txt
User-agent: ExaSearchBot
Disallow: /

Asks ExaSearchBot not to crawl any page. Add it to the robots.txt file at the root of your site, above any wider rules.

Ignored robots.txt?

Spot it in your logs.

Match the name, then check where the request came from. Anyone can copy a user-agent. Search your own logs for ExaSearchBot.

User-agentsource
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ExaSearchBot/1.0; +https://crawler.exa.ai/)

Version numbers change. Match the highlighted name, not the whole string.

  1. 1

    Match the name

    Search your server or CDN log for ExaSearchBot, case-insensitive. A match is a clue, not proof.

  2. 2

    Check the signed requests (Web Bot Auth)

    Exa signs every ExaSearchBot request with HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421), so the check holds regardless of IP address. crawler.exa.ai/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory

Is this really ExaSearchBot?

Signed requests

Exa signs each ExaSearchBot request with HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421), so its address proves nothing. A genuine request carries Signature, Signature-Input and Signature-Agent headers, and the signature checks out against Exa’s published keys.

Many CDNs, Cloudflare included, check these signatures for you and mark the request as a verified bot. Without a signature, it isn’t ExaSearchBot.

crawler.exa.ai/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory

Serve the content in HTML

The cited operator material does not verify JavaScript rendering. Serve useful HTML before client-side JavaScript where possible.

If ExaSearchBot is not named in robots.txt, Exa says it follows your rules for major search engines, then the * group. Robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing: use a noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header to remove a page from Exa’s index.

Questions, answered.

ExaSearchBot is a crawler for Exa's search engine. Exa says its purpose is search and retrieval: connecting people and applications to your content and sending them back to your site.

Sources.

Officially documented. Operator facts and Trakkr’s measurements keep separate dates.

  1. [1]
    Exa crawler documentation

    Officially documented · checked 17 September 2026

    crawler.exa.ai/

First verified 17 September 2026. Last source check 17 September 2026.

All AI crawlers

See which AI crawlers read your site.

Trakkr shows which bots, ExaSearchBot included, visit which pages each day, and whether the answers they feed mention you.

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