Exa vs Serper: which search API for your agent?
Compared on the same 170-query benchmark (judge κ=0.78). On list price, Serper is ~7.0× cheaper.
Per-class winner
Which of the two returns better results per query class (indicative — quality judged on 62 queries). For cost, see the cards above.
List prices as of 2026; actual cost varies by plan tier and volume. Notably: Serper drops to ~$0.30/1k at scale; Firecrawl 'Enhanced Mode' is ~5x for bot-protected sites. Comparisons use published list prices for a like-for-like baseline.
Pick Exa if… pick Serper if… or route both
Pick Exa when your queries are academic, semantic, and page-content retrieval. Pick Serper when your queries are cheap web and news links. On plain web/news lookups, a cheaper engine usually matches both — so don't hard-code one.
Don't pick one — route to the cheapest that clears your bar.
GroundRoute sends each query to the best-value engine and caches the result. You keep half of what the cache saves you, never more than going direct.