Exa MCP Server

v0.2.0 · by Felix Zeller · added 3 November 2026

Exa web search, page fetching, and Exa Agent for Zed's Agent Panel, via Exa's hosted MCP server

MCP servers

How to install

With Forge Super installed, the button above opens the app on this extension, where you press Install. Nothing is installed until you do.

You can also open the Extensions panel in the app and search for Exa MCP Server. The extension's id is mcp-server-exa-search.

Don't have Forge Super yet? Download it here.

README

From the extension's repository, written by its authors and not by Mentenaz. See the source.

Exa MCP Server for Zed

A Zed extension that connects Zed's Agent Panel to Exa's hosted MCP server (https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp) via mcp-remote, giving your agent web search, page fetching, and Exa Agent tools.

Install

Open Zed's Extensions view (zed: extensions), search for Exa, and click Install.

Tools

Enabled by default:

Tool	Description
`web_search_exa`	Search the web for any topic and get clean, ready-to-use content
`web_fetch_exa`	Read a webpage's full content as clean markdown from one or more URLs

Available via the tools setting:

Tool	Description
`web_search_advanced_exa`	Advanced search with filters, domains, dates, highlights, summaries, and subpage crawling
`agent_run`	Run an Exa Agent for multi-step research, list-building, enrichment, and structured output (requires an API key)

Note: setting tools replaces the defaults entirely — list every tool you want enabled.

Configuration

Add an exa_api_key and/or tools under the server's settings in settings.json:

{
    "context_servers": {
        "mcp-server-exa-search": {
            "settings": {
                "exa_api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
                "tools": "web_search_exa,web_fetch_exa,agent_run"
            }
        }
    }
}

Authentication

The hosted server works anonymously with rate limits — no key required for web_search_exa and web_fetch_exa. An API key from dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys raises your rate limits and unlocks agent_run (Exa Agent). The key is passed to the server as ?exaApiKey=.

Without the extension

Zed natively supports remote MCP servers (with OAuth), so you can skip the extension entirely and add this to settings.json:

{
    "context_servers": {
        "exa": {
            "url": "https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp"
        }
    }
}

Using it in the Agent Panel

Open the Agent Panel settings and check the indicator dot next to the Exa server — green means it's running. Tools can be toggled per agent profile. See the Zed MCP docs for details.

Full tool docs: docs.exa.ai/reference/exa-mcp