How Exa lets AI agents buy search on demand
96K+
Agent transactions settled
Coinbase Business case study, retrieved October 29, 2026.700+
Agents and wallets paying Exa
Coinbase Business case study, retrieved October 29, 2026.$0.007
Price of a standard search
Exa x402 pricing for an “auto” search of up to 10 results, paid in USDC. Exa docs, retrieved November 2, 2026.Exa is a search engine built for AI agents. It returns the most relevant information all at once, in an agent-friendly format. With x402 on Base, agents can now also pay for that search at the moment they need it, and Exa has settled more than 96,000 agent transactions this way.
Search that skips the sign-up
Exa was built on the idea that agents and humans want different things from a search engine. A human scans a page of results and picks one. An agent wants everything relevant in one pass, ranked by usefulness rather than popularity.
Getting that search into an agent used to require a person in the loop. Someone had to add a credit card, buy credits, create an API key and place it in the agent’s environment before the first query could run. Each service an agent relied on meant another round of the same setup.
One request, one payment
With x402, an agent sends a search query without an API key. Exa replies with a payment request that lists the price and how to pay. The agent pays from its wallet in USDC on Base, the payment settles onchain, and Exa returns the results. Nobody signs up for anything.
It is closer to a vending machine than a store account. The agent pays for what it needs, when it needs it, and moves on.
USDC on Base was the first way to buy Exa search without an API key. The same 402 response can list other ways to pay, so an agent picks whichever its wallet supports.
“It makes complete sense for you to just fund a wallet and then have access to a hundred services.”
Jakub Hojsan
Forward Deployed Engineer, Exa
Why Base
Base is proving itself to be the chain where agentic payments settle. Coinbase Developer Platform verifies each payment and settles it on Base, so Exa did not have to build or run that part itself. During the integration Exa worked directly with the CDP team on making verification and settlement easier for a service like its own, and that feedback went back into the platform. Exa chose Coinbase infrastructure for its track record: it has been running onchain payments for years, and Exa wanted a settlement layer it would not have to think about.
What this enables
For developers building personal agents, search becomes something the agent buys as a task requires it, from a wallet that can also pay a hundred other services. For API businesses, Exa shows how to add a wallet-based payment path next to existing billing without replacing it. Exa expects larger customers to keep signing enterprise contracts and paying by invoice; x402 is the path for everyone else.
Interested in making your API available to agents?
Talk to Base about connecting your service to x402 payments and USDC settlement.
Exa is an independent third-party company and a Coinbase Business customer. It is not affiliated with Coinbase or Base. For informational purposes only; nothing here is an offer, a solicitation or investment advice. Exa operates its own search service and sets its own pricing, which may change. Payments are made in USDC and require a funded digital asset wallet; using digital assets involves risk. Availability is subject to eligibility and geographic restrictions. Figures are reported by Exa and Coinbase Business as of publication and may change.
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