AmygdalavsExa AI

Different data,
same stack.

Exa finds content. Amygdala finds who's behind it.

Exa finds semantically relevant web content using neural search. Amygdala finds the verified humans behind that content — ranked by real authority signals, not page relevance. Use Exa for content discovery, Amygdala for source verification.

FeatureAmygdalaExa AI
What it returnsRanked authority profiles (JSON)Semantically relevant web pages and content
Search typeSemantic authority searchNeural semantic web search
Authority scoring✓ Built-in authority ranking✗ Relevance scoring only, no authority ranking
Infrastructure100% EU (Hetzner Helsinki, Mistral, Weaviate)US-based (San Francisco)
GDPR compliance✓ Full, no US API/index data transfers✗ US-based, requires SCCs for EU use
MCP support✓ 4 native tools✗ No official MCP server
REST API✓ 4 endpoints✓ Multiple endpoints (Search, Find Similar, Contents)
Free tier$50 starter credits1,000 free requests/month
Pricing$25/1K searches$7/1K searches, $12/1K deep
1Use Exa to find relevant web content on your topic
2Use Amygdala to verify and rank the authors behind that content
3Your LLM gets sources with credibility scores attached

The best AI pipelines don't choose between content retrieval and authority verification — they use both.

What Amygdala adds to your stack

The authority layer Exa doesn't provide.

Authority layer on top of retrieval

Exa finds content. Amygdala tells you who the verified authorities behind that content are. Use Exa for retrieval, Amygdala for source verification and attribution.

Source verification in one call

Before your AI cites a source, verify it. Pass any social handle to Amygdala's match endpoint and know instantly whether they're a ranked authority or just noise. No other search API offers this.

EU-native infrastructure

Amygdala runs on Hetzner (Helsinki, Finland), Mistral AI (Paris), and Weaviate (Amsterdam). For EU teams, this eliminates third-country transfer obligations entirely.

API comparison

Same query. Very different data.

Query both APIs for "AI safety experts" and compare what comes back.

Exa: neural web search
Request
curl -X POST "https://api.exa.ai/search" \
  -H "x-api-key: exa_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "top experts on AI safety",
    "numResults": 5,
    "type": "neural"
  }'
Response
{
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "AI Safety — Alignment Forum",
      "url": "https://alignmentforum.org/posts/...",
      "score": 0.87,
      "publishedDate": "2024-03-15",
      "author": "Paul Christiano"
    },
    {
      "title": "On the Importance of AI Safety Research",
      "url": "https://lesswrong.com/posts/...",
      "score": 0.82,
      "author": null
    }
  ]
}
Result: Forum posts and articles scored by relevance. One has an author field, one doesn't. No verified identity, no authority rank, no social profile. You still have to figure out who these people are.
Amygdala: authority index API
Request
curl "https://api.amygdala.eu/api/v1/index?query=AI+safety&limit=5" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer amyg_..."
Response: ranked authorities
{
  "duration": 0.084,
  "results": [
    {
      "sdu": "2941...207",
      "name": "Stuart Russell",
      "rank": 1,
      "country_name": "United States",
      "topic": "AI Safety"
    },
    {
      "sdu": "1839...561",
      "name": "Paul Christiano",
      "rank": 2,
      "country_name": "United States",
      "topic": "AI Safety"
    }
  ]
}
Enrich with /detail
{
  "results": [{
    "name": "Stuart Russell",
    "bio": "Professor at UC Berkeley. Pioneer of AI safety research, co-author of the standard AI textbook.",
    "country": "United States",
    "topics": ["AI Safety", "Machine Learning"],
    "socials": {
      "twitter":  { "handle": "@stuartjrussell", "followers": 52400 },
      "linkedin": { "handle": "stuart-russell-ai",  "followers": 18200 }
    }
  }]
}
Result: Ranked authority profiles with verified social handles, follower counts, and structured bios, deduplicated, ready for your LLM context or UI.

Pricing comparison

What one API call gives you.

Exa AI
$7/1K searches · $12/1K deep

$7/1K for search with contents (10 results). $12/1K for Exa Deep. 1,000 free requests/month.

Per result: a URL, a title, and extracted content. You still need to identify the author, verify their credibility, find their social profiles, and determine their authority level.

Amygdala
$25/1K searches

$50 in free credits on signup. No credit card required.

Per result: name, authority rank, country, verified social handles with follower counts, bio, peer network, authority score, and signal growth — structured JSON, no post-processing needed.

One search returns up to 25 complete authority profiles. Getting equivalent data from Exa would require additional scraping, author identification, and manual cross-referencing.

Start free

When to use which

Use them together.

Use Exa when you need:
  • Semantically similar web content retrieval
  • Neural search across the open web
  • Find-similar-to-URL discovery
  • Content retrieval for document-based RAG
Use Amygdala when you need:
  • Ranked, verified authorities
  • Anti-spam, anti-AI-noise authority data
  • GDPR-compliant authority data for EU products
  • Social handle enrichment and verification
  • Peer network and influence graph mapping
  • MCP tools for Claude, Cursor, and AI agents
  • Structured authority profiles for AI attribution

Use Exa to find relevant content, Amygdala to verify and rank the authors behind it. Your LLM gets sources with credibility scores attached — and you know you're citing real authorities, not SEO noise.

See how to build this in a RAG pipeline →

Start with $50 in free credits

No credit card required. Full API access from day one.