Exa Highlights

What this post added

Introduced significant improvements to Exa's 'highlights' extraction method, a core component of the search pipeline. The new highlights model extracts relevant excerpts from web pages with higher quality and drastically reduced token usage (~94% fewer tokens on some evals), leading to cost and latency benefits. This improvement is particularly effective for long-context documents and technical coding docs. The highlights are now run for every request (not cached) and complete in under 100ms, serving as the retrieval substrate for agentic products.