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Exa is a search engine built for AIs. It exposes an official remote MCP server that you can register on the TrueFoundry MCP Gateway, so your agents can search the web, research companies and people, crawl pages, and pull code context through governed access. Exa’s MCP server is open — it requires no authentication to get started.

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How TrueFoundry Manages the MCP Server

TrueFoundry’s MCP Gateway acts as a reverse proxy between your agents and MCP servers like Exa. When you register Exa, TrueFoundry handles:
  • Authentication — Exa’s MCP server works with no auth, so there’s nothing to configure to get started. If you hit rate limits, supply your own Exa API key by adding exaApiKey=YOUR_EXA_API_KEY to the server URL.
  • Tool-level access control — You can selectively enable or disable individual Exa tools per team from the TrueFoundry UI, or scope the toolset directly in the URL (see below).
  • Audit trail — Every tool invocation is traced with the calling user, tool name, input payload, and latency. Traces export via OpenTelemetry to your observability stack.
  • Guardrails — TrueFoundry’s guardrail hooks apply at mcp_pre_tool (before a tool is invoked) and mcp_post_tool (after the tool returns), letting you enforce content policies on search queries and results in real time.

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Adding Exa to TrueFoundry

1

Open the Add MCP Server picker

Navigate to MCP Servers in the TrueFoundry sidebar and click Add new MCP Server. Select Connect Official Remote MCP Servers — this lists official, vetted remote MCP servers.
Add new MCP Server picker with the Connect Official Remote MCP Servers option highlighted
2

Select Exa

Find the exa card in the catalog (described as “Search Engine made for AIs by Exa”) and click + Add.
Official remote MCP server catalog with the exa card and its Add button highlighted
3

Configure the server

TrueFoundry pre-fills the server details for Exa:
FieldValue
Nameexa
DescriptionSearch Engine made for AIs by Exa
URLhttps://mcp.exa.ai/mcp
Add Collaborators — the users and teams that can use or manage this server — and assign each an MCP Server Manager or MCP Server User role. Leave Auth Data toggled off, since Exa requires no authentication. Click Update MCP Server to save.
Register MCP Server form for Exa with the name, description, URL, collaborators, and Auth Data toggled off
Prefer configuration as code? Click Apply using YAML and paste a spec like the one in Scoping the toolset below.
4

Verify tools

Open the Tools tab on the Exa server detail page. It populates with Exa’s available tools — web search, company and people research, crawling, code context, and deep research. Exa also exposes MCP Prompts and Resources on their own tabs. Each tool shows its description and a Try button so you can test it before wiring it into an agent.
Exa Tools tab showing No Auth and tools such as web_search_exa, web_search_advanced_exa, company_research_exa, crawling_exa, people_search_exa, and get_code_context_exa

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Scoping the Toolset and Using an API Key

Exa selects which tools the server exposes through a tools query parameter on the URL, and accepts an optional exaApiKey to lift rate limits. To pin a specific toolset (and optionally your key), register the server with a URL like: 
https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp?tools=web_search_exa,web_search_advanced_exa,get_code_context_exa,crawling_exa,company_research_exa,people_search_exa,deep_researcher_start,deep_researcher_check
The equivalent YAML for the Apply using YAML option: 
url: >-
  https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp?tools=web_search_exa,web_search_advanced_exa,get_code_context_exa,crawling_exa,company_research_exa,people_search_exa,deep_researcher_start,deep_researcher_check
name: exa
type: mcp-server/remote
description: >-
  Search Engine made for AIs by Exa (use exaApiKey=YOUR_EXA_API_KEY in the URL
  if you are running into rate limit issues)
collaborators:
  - role_id: mcp-server-manager
    subject: user:you@your-company.com
Append &exaApiKey=YOUR_EXA_API_KEY to the URL if you run into rate limits. Get a key from the Exa dashboard.

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Connecting to an MCP Client

TrueFoundry exposes the Exa MCP server over HTTP transport. The endpoint is specific to your TrueFoundry tenant, so don’t construct it by hand — copy the exact URL and ready-to-paste connection commands from the How To Use tab on the Exa server detail page. The How To Use tab generates connection instructions for every major client, including Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code, Claude Web, Claude Desktop, Windsurf, Codex, and the Python and TypeScript MCP SDKs. Pick your client, copy the snippet, and paste it in.
Exa How To Use tab showing connection commands for multiple MCP clients

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Using the Tool Playground

Before deploying an agent, you can test any Exa tool directly in TrueFoundry — click Try next to a tool such as web_search_exa, fill in the inputs, click Execute Tool, and inspect the JSON output in the right panel.
Exa tool playground showing tool inputs and the JSON output panel

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Tool Metrics

The Tool Metrics tab on the Exa server detail page shows per-tool usage data: invocation count, latency distribution, and error rates. Use this to monitor which tools your agents are using and whether any tool is producing errors in production.

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Disabling Individual Tools

If your use case only needs a subset of Exa’s tools, you can disable the rest from the Tools tab. Each tool has a toggle to enable or disable it. Disabled tools are not callable by agents — they will not appear in the tool list returned to the MCP client. This reduces the tool surface exposed to the agent and avoids unnecessary calls.

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Next Steps

MCP Gateway Overview

Learn how the TrueFoundry MCP Gateway centralizes access, auth, and observability for all your MCP servers.

MCP Gateway Getting Started

Add MCP servers and use them in the AI Gateway playground and IDEs.

Exa documentation

Reference for Exa’s search, research, crawling, and code context APIs.

MCP Gateway Security

Configure authentication and guardrails on your MCP servers.