The ShareBuilder Assistant is expanding its research and data-enrichment ecosystem with a Connector that brings Exa into the Assistant Skills platform. With the Exa Connector, media teams can search the live web, answer questions with cited sources, extract useful information from websites, discover similar pages, and automatically react when new relevant information appears online.
About Exa
Exa is a web search and research platform built for AI applications and agents. Instead of relying only on traditional keyword matching, Exa can use semantic search to find pages based on meaning and intent, retrieve page content, generate focused summaries, and return structured information that other systems can use.
For media organizations, that creates useful building blocks for advertiser research, prospecting, account enrichment, competitive intelligence, market research, and workflows that need current information from the public web.
This is the Exa Connector
The Exa Connector brings six Exa capabilities into Assistant Skills: Answer Question, Find Search Results, Find Similar Links, Extract Page Contents, New Search Result, and Make API Call.
Unlike many research connectors, Exa can do more than run a search when a person asks for one. The New Search Result trigger can continuously watch a defined search and start a workflow when Exa discovers a page it has not returned before.
Research advertisers, prospects, and markets
Find Search Results lets a Skill search the web using a natural-language query and return relevant pages for the rest of the workflow.
Searches can be narrowed by factors such as page category, included or excluded domains, publication dates, and location. Results can also include cleaned page text, relevant highlights, and a focused summary.
That can support workflows such as:
- researching a new advertiser before a seller begins outreach
- finding companies that match a target business profile
- gathering recent news about an existing account
- identifying market or category trends before a sales meeting
- finding financial reports, company pages, people, PDFs, news, or other specific content
- enriching a CRM record with current public information
Instead of asking a seller to open a browser, search manually, read several pages, and copy useful details into CRM, a Skill can perform the research as part of the workflow and deliver the useful context where the seller already works.
Ask questions and keep the sources
Answer Question lets a Skill ask Exa a question and receive an AI-generated answer grounded in live web sources, along with the pages used as citations.
For example, a Skill could ask about a company’s recent expansion, ownership, product offering, market presence, or another fact needed during account research. The resulting answer and source links can then be passed into a CRM workflow, briefing, approval step, or another AI process.
This is particularly useful when the workflow needs both a concise answer and evidence behind it. Teams should still review important claims before using them in customer-facing material or business decisions, especially when source quality or recency matters.
Turn websites into usable workflow data
Extract Page Contents takes known URLs and retrieves clean, AI-ready content from those pages.
A Skill can return full page text, relevant highlights, or a focused summary based on a question such as “What does this company sell?” or “What locations does this business operate?” It can also inspect linked subpages, allowing the workflow to look beyond a homepage toward relevant areas such as About or Pricing.
For media sales teams, this can make website research much more useful. A workflow could receive an advertiser’s website from ShareBuilder CRM, extract the important content, pass that information to an AI model for structured enrichment, and return useful details to the account record or seller.
Discover related companies and content
Find Similar Links searches for pages that are semantically similar to a known URL.
That opens a different type of prospecting workflow. Instead of starting with a list of keywords, a seller or manager can begin with an example company, article, organization, or page that represents what they are looking for and use Exa to find similar material.
A Skill could use an existing advertiser’s website as a starting point, find related companies, apply additional qualification logic, check the results against CRM, and route potential new prospects for review.
Similarity does not automatically mean that two businesses are competitors or equally valuable prospects. It should be treated as a discovery signal that can feed the next step of a workflow.
Watch the web for new opportunities or changes
New Search Result is the connector’s trigger. It watches a defined Exa search and starts a Skill when a new matching page appears.
The first run establishes a baseline rather than firing on all existing results. After that, newly discovered pages can trigger downstream automation.
A media organization could use this to watch for:
- news about important advertisers or prospects
- newly announced businesses or expansions in a market
- relevant company or industry announcements
- new financial reports or other public documents
- emerging stories tied to a sales category
- new pages matching a defined prospect profile
Once a new result appears, Assistant Skills can evaluate it, summarize it, compare it with CRM data, create a task, notify the appropriate seller, or continue into another connected system.
This turns web research from a periodic manual task into an event-driven workflow.
Extend Exa for advanced workflows
Make API Call provides an authorized path to supported Exa API operations that do not yet have a dedicated guided action. It supports GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests and returns the response status, headers, and body.
The connector includes an important security control: full URLs are accepted only when they point to the Exa API host, preventing the connected Exa API key from being sent to an unrelated destination.
Advanced calls should still be configured and tested by qualified administrators before they are used in production workflows.
Keep research grounded and reviewable
Web research is useful because it brings outside information into a workflow, but outside information can be incomplete, outdated, or wrong.
Production Skills should preserve source URLs where possible, define acceptable source and domain rules, account for duplicate results, and use human review when research affects important customer-facing communication or business decisions.
Teams should also consider the amount of page content being retrieved. Some Exa options, including full page text and repeated monitoring searches, consume additional Exa credits. Workflows should retrieve only the information they actually need.
Assistant Skills
Skills are the workflows you train the ShareBuilder Assistant to run for your team. Create a Skill and the Assistant executes playbooks, coordinates processes, updates systems, and communicates across platforms automatically.
Availability
The current Exa Connector package includes one trigger, New Search Result, and five actions: Answer Question, Find Search Results, Find Similar Links, Extract Page Contents, and Make API Call.
An Exa account and API key are required. Exa usage, credit consumption, API limits, search behavior, and available features remain subject to the customer’s Exa account and service terms.
The connector can return page text, highlights, summaries, citations, metadata, and search results depending on the selected action and configuration. Some options increase Exa usage costs, so production Skills should be configured with appropriate search depth, result counts, polling behavior, and content retrieval.
Connector availability within Assistant Skills depends on ShareBuilders installation, testing, configuration, rollout, and customer enablement. Presence in the upstream connector library does not by itself confirm production readiness for a specific customer.
For more information
To learn more about ShareBuilder Assistant Skills or discuss using the Exa Connector for research, prospecting, and enrichment workflows, visit ShareBuilder Assistant Skills or contact ShareBuilders.
About ShareBuilders
ShareBuilders delivers a media-focused sales platform that includes Pricing, CRM, Data Enrichment, and workflow automation. Built specifically for media organizations, ShareBuilders helps teams manage pipelines, activity, pricing, and performance with secure cloud access and mobile tools designed for sellers on the go.
