How to integrate Exa MCP with Atomic Agent

Connect Atomic Agent to Exa MCP. Summarize recent news articles on ai safety, find similar research papers to this url, and more using natural language, with authentication handled for you.

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Exa is a data extraction and search platform for gathering and analyzing information from websites, APIs, or databases. It helps teams quickly surface insights and automate data-driven workflows.

18 Tools

Introduction

Atomic Agent is an open-source AI agent that runs on your machine and supports local models through llama.cpp. Connect it to 1,500+ apps through Composio, including Exa.

This guide uses Atomic Agent's built-in Composio integration. You need Atomic Agent v0.5.6 or later, your own Composio API key, and a Exa account. See the Atomic Agent documentation for installation instructions.

Also integrate Exa with

How Atomic Agent connects to Exa

Atomic Agent connects to Composio's Tool Router over Streamable HTTP MCP. It discovers the tools needed for your request, and Composio handles account authentication.

Execution and account-connection tools follow Atomic Agent's configured approval policy. Review any approval prompt before allowing an action on your connected account.

Connect Exa to Atomic Agent

  1. Sign up or sign in to the Composio dashboard. Copy your API key.
  2. In Atomic Agent, open the Integrations tab and select Composio. Select API key, press e, paste the key, and press Enter. The tools become available immediately, without a restart.
  3. Ask Atomic Agent to do something in Exa. It searches Composio for the right tool.
  4. On first use, open the sign-in link returned in the chat. Connect your Exa account, then return to Atomic Agent to continue.

Headless setup

Add the following line to ~/.atomic-agent/.env, replacing YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY with your key. Start Atomic Agent after saving the file.

bash
COMPOSIO_API_KEY=YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY

What is the Exa MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Exa MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your Exa account. It provides structured and secure access to Exa’s web search, content extraction, and research tools, so your agent can search the web, generate cited answers, retrieve website content, conduct in-depth research, and organize findings on your behalf.

  • Web search: Have your agent search the web with Exa to find relevant sources for a topic, question, company, or market.
  • Citation-backed answers: Ask the agent to answer specific questions or summarize broad topics using supporting web sources and citations.
  • Website content extraction: Direct your agent to retrieve text, highlights, summaries, and linked subpages from websites or saved documents.
  • Multi-step research: Let the agent start research tasks, check their progress, and return synthesized findings with citations when the work is complete.
  • Research collection management: Instruct your agent to create or delete web collections, import data into them, review imports, add enrichment, and set up monitors.

Use Exa from Atomic Agent

With your account connected, ask Atomic Agent to work with Exa in natural language. You can connect more apps through the same Composio integration as you need them.

Visit the Atomic Agent website or inspect the Atomic Agent source code.

Troubleshooting

Why is my API key rejected?

Copy the key directly from the Composio dashboard. Atomic Agent requires ASCII characters because it sends the key in an HTTP header. Remove any extra characters introduced when copying.

Why are Composio tools unavailable after saving a key?

Check that you use Atomic Agent v0.5.6 or later and that Composio is enabled in your configuration. A "composio": { "enabled": false } setting disables the integration while keeping the saved key on disk.

Does Composio have a free plan?

The Hobby plan includes 100,000 tool calls per month. Composio-managed OAuth apps have a lower included allowance. See Composio pricing for the current limits that apply to your connection.

TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every Exa action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Generate an answer

Generates a direct, citation-backed answer to a clear natural language question or topic using Exa's search, adept at both specific answers and detailed summaries for open-ended queries.

Create Import

Tool to create a new import to upload data into a Webset.

Create a Monitor

Tool to create a new Monitor.

Create Research Task

Creates an asynchronous research task that explores the web, gathers sources, synthesizes findings, and returns results with citations.

Create Webset

Tool to create a new Webset with search, import, and enrichment setup.

Delete import

Tool to delete an existing import.

Delete webset

Tool to delete a Webset.

Find similar

Finds web pages semantically similar to a given URL using embeddings-based search, optionally retrieving full text, highlights, or summaries for results.

Get API Key

Tool to retrieve details of a specific API key by its ID.

Get contents from URLs or document IDs

Retrieves configurable text and highlights from a list of Exa document IDs or publicly accessible URLs.

Get Event

Tool to get details of a specific event by its ID.

Get Research Task

Tool to retrieve the status and results of a previously created research task.

List events

Tool to list all events that have occurred in the system.

List imports

Tool to list all imports for the Webset.

List research tasks

Tool to retrieve a paginated list of your research tasks.

List webhooks

Tool to list all webhooks for Websets.

Search

Performs a web search using the Exa engine, useful for queries requiring advanced filtering, specific content categories, or AI-optimized prompting.

Update import

Tool to update an import configuration by ID.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone Exa MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Exa tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Exa and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. Atomic Agent fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Exa tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Exa scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Exa data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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