/exa

Query Patterns: People

Use category:people for LinkedIn-weighted results. For discovery queries, be specific -- vague queries like "category:people researcher founder CEO startup" will match many irrelevant LinkedIn profiles. Include specific companies, timeframes, or roles to narrow results.

// By company + role
web_search_exa { "query": "category:people engineer at OpenAI", "numResults": 10 }
web_search_exa { "query": "category:people VP director at Cursor", "numResults": 10 }

// By role + location
web_search_exa { "query": "category:people Head of Growth B2B SaaS startup San Francisco", "numResults": 12 }

// Specific person
web_search_exa { "query": "category:people Jane Smith Anthropic machine learning", "numResults": 5 }

For comprehensive company coverage, search by department and seniority in parallel:

web_search_exa { "query": "category:people engineering at Acme", "numResults": 10 }
web_search_exa { "query": "category:people product design at Acme", "numResults": 10 }
web_search_exa { "query": "category:people sales marketing at Acme", "numResults": 10 }

Supplement with non-LinkedIn sources:

web_search_exa { "query": "Acme team page employees about us", "numResults": 5 }
web_search_exa { "query": "joined Acme recently hired new role announcement", "numResults": 5 }

Deduplicate by LinkedIn URL (canonical) or name + current company (fallback).