Exa

The Exa tool gives a workbench agent web search and page fetching through Exa. Use it when an investigation needs current information from outside your systems, such as vendor status pages, release notes, CVE advisories, or documentation for an error message.

Plural connects to Exa's hosted MCP server and enables two of its tools. For the complete list of integrations and general tool behavior, see Workbench tools.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• Outbound network access from Plural Console to https://mcp.exa.ai.
• An Exa API key, unless you rely on the key provided by Plural Cloud or on Exa's keyless access. See API keys.
• Permission in Plural Console to create a configured tool and edit the target workbench.
• An existing workbench, or permission to create one. See Setting up a workbench.

API keys

Plural uses the Exa API key configured for your Console instance:

• Plural Cloud provides a built-in Exa key for workbench use. Plural Cloud instances also include a configured tool named exa, attached to the default plural workbench.
• Self-hosted Console uses the key in the EXA_API_KEY environment variable of the Console deployment. With the Console Helm chart, set the secrets.exaApiKey value. To create a key, open the Exa dashboard API keys page, create a key, and copy it immediately. You can name the key and set a rate limit on it in Exa.

If no key is configured, Plural connects to Exa without one. Exa serves keyless connections with free, rate-limited usage and returns 429 errors when that limit is reached.