## Recommendation: **Exa** (with Tavily as the very close runner-up) Given your hard constraint — factual accuracy, source quality, and verifiable citations *above* latency/price/ease — Exa is the pick, with Tavily a near-tie I'd choose instead only if integration speed mattered most. ### Why Exa - **Highest independently-measured factual accuracy.** Its Research API leads SimpleQA (~94–95%), edging Tavily (~93%) in third-party comparisons. - **Neural/semantic retrieval improves source quality.** Rather than keyword-matching, it surfaces authoritative primary sources — important in finance, where the real hallucination risk is grounding on SEO-spam or stale forum content. - **Most granular, verifiable citations.** Returns field-level citations with confidence scores (low/med/high), LLM-identified highlights with cosine-similarity scores, plus full page text and dates. - **Finance-relevant controls.** Category targeting (company profiles, news, research papers) + domain filtering let you constrain to trusted sources (SEC, Reuters, company IR) — a direct anti-hallucination lever. ### Main alternatives considered - **Tavily** — purpose-built for RAG grounding; per-source relevance scores, content chunks, domain whitelisting (up to 300), and an *official* `langchain-tavily` package (`TavilySearch`) that drops straight into your `create_react_agent`. The pragmatic choice; lost only