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ExaUser

Exa's on-demand fetcher that retrieves a page live when a user or an app built on the Exa API asks for it.
ExaExaUser
AI AssistantUser InitiatedAI Search

What is ExaUser?

ExaUser is the user-agent Exa uses for live page fetches. Exa is a search engine and API built for AI applications, and its ExaUser documentation says the fetcher runs when a user, or an application built on the Exa API, asks for the current content of a page.

Exa states that ExaUser is not used to crawl the web automatically. That role belongs to ExaSearchBot, which discovers and indexes pages. ExaUser is also not used to decide whether content may appear in Exa search, so a robots.txt rule for it does not work as a search opt-out.

The documented user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ExaUser/1.0; +https://crawler.exa.ai/exauser). Every request is signed with Web Bot Auth (RFC 9421), and the public keys are published at https://crawler.exa.ai/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. Cloudflare, Akamai and other providers that support Web Bot Auth validate it at the edge.

Because a person or application initiates each fetch, Exa says robots.txt rules may not apply. It also says ExaUser does not try to bypass logins, paywalls or CAPTCHAs, and does not submit forms.

Relevant for AI searchExa

Is ExaUser relevant for AI search?

Yes. ExaUser fetches pages for people and apps using Exa's search API, which feeds AI agents and answer engines.

ExaUser fetches a page live when someone, or an application built on the Exa API, asks for its current content. Exa says it is not used to decide whether content appears in Exa search. That is the job of ExaSearchBot. Blocking ExaUser mostly stops on-demand retrieval of fresh page text by AI agents that rely on Exa, so those agents answer from other sources instead.

How to handle ExaUser

Most sites leave ExaUser allowed. Its requests come from people and agents that want to read a specific page, and blocking it means those answers cite someone else.

Do not rely on robots.txt for this bot. Exa says user-initiated fetches may not follow it. To keep the search index decision separate, manage ExaSearchBot in robots.txt:

User-agent: ExaSearchBot
Disallow: /

If you need to block ExaUser itself, verify the Web Bot Auth signature against Exa's key directory and apply the rule at your CDN or WAF.

Examples

  • An AI agent built on the Exa API fetches the current version of a pricing page so it can quote today's numbers.
  • A site owner sees ExaUser requests for a single article in the logs and matches them to a user asking an assistant to summarize it.
  • A publisher blocks `ExaSearchBot` in robots.txt but leaves ExaUser alone, then confirms in the logs that only on-demand fetches arrive.

Frequently asked questions about ExaUser

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

ExaSearchBot crawls the public web to build Exa's search index. ExaUser only fetches a page when a user or an app asks for its current content.

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