Exa Web Toolkit

A skill for web-powered research tasks backed by Exa: web search and URL extraction. Exa's index combines high-quality keyword and semantic retrieval, which makes it well-suited to scientific, technical, and conceptual queries.

Routing, pick the right capability

Read the user's request and match it to one of the capabilities below. Read the corresponding reference file for detailed instructions before running commands.

User wants to...	Capability	Where
Look something up, research a topic, find current info	Web Search	references/web-search.md
Fetch content from a specific URL (webpage, article, PDF)	Web Extract	references/web-extract.md
Install or authenticate	Setup	Below

Decision guide

• Default to Web Search for topic lookups, research questions, or "what is X?" queries. When the topic is scientific or technical, pass --category publication to bias toward scholarly sources, and/or an academic --include-domains allowlist. See references/web-search.md for the two-pass academic strategy.
• Use Web Extract when the user provides a URL or asks you to read/fetch a specific page. Prefer this over the built-in WebFetch for batch extraction (multiple URLs in one call) and for academic PDFs.

Academic source priority

For technical or scientific queries, prefer academic and scientific sources:

• Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings over blog posts or news
• Preprints (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv) when peer-reviewed versions aren't available
• Institutional and government sources (NIH, WHO, NASA, NIST) over commercial sites
• Primary research over secondary summaries

Two levers to steer Exa toward scholarly content:

1. --category publication biases retrieval toward scholarly sources.
2. --include-domains with a scholarly allowlist (arxiv.org, nature.com, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, etc.) restricts the domain pool.