Exa API returned 402 error

A September 2, 2026 world-news briefing said three requested Exa API searches failed with the identical message “Exa API returned 402,” leaving the packet without source-backed reporting on China property stimulus, Ukraine-Russia frontline developments and the U.S. election campaign. The briefing said no replacement articles were supplied and described the result as an information gap rather than a verified update on any of the three topics. (exa.ai) The note said the search log itself was the only citable evidence available for those entries. (exa.ai) The effect was procedural: the briefing could not safely refresh fast-moving stories without new material. ### What does a 402 response mean in Exa’s own system? Exa’s documentation says its `/search` and `/contents` endpoints can return HTTP 402 Payment Required when a request is sent without an API key or payment header. The company says those requests receive a `PAYMENT-REQUIRED` header describing pricing and supported payment networks, and that a client can retry after adding the required payment signature. Exa also says x402 payments and standard API-key access are separate paths. If a request includes an `x-api-key` or `Authorization: Bearer` header, the company says the normal API-key billing flow is used instead of the x402 payment flow. ### Why would the same message appear across three unrelated searches? The September 2 briefing said the same error appeared for all three requested topics: China property stimulus measures, Ukraine-Russia frontline developments and the U.S. election campaign latest. (exa.ai) Because the subjects were unrelated, the repeated failure pointed to the search mechanism rather than to the content of any one query, according to the briefing’s account of the log. Exa’s pricing and billing pages describe a pay-as-you-go credit system in which users load credits and are charged per request. (exa.ai) The company says new accounts receive free credits, monthly free-tier credits continue after sign-up, and remaining balances are shown on the billing page. ### Does the error prove Exa had a broader outage? GitHub issue reports from developers show that Exa-backed searches have previously returned HTTP 402 errors in third-party tools, including cases where users said searches that had worked earlier stopped returning results. Those reports do not establish a platform-wide outage on September 2, 2026, but they show the error has appeared before in external integrations. The available record here is narrower. The briefing documented only that its own three requests failed and that no substitute coverage was available in the packet. (exa.ai) It did not identify the calling application, the account status, the request headers or whether the failure came from missing credentials, exhausted credits or an integration bug. ### What was the newsroom consequence of the failure? The September 2 note said the packet contained no fresh, citable reporting on the three topics that would ordinarily lead a world-news file in early September. (github.com) It said repeating earlier themes without new reporting would risk presenting stale information as current, and it therefore issued a methodological note instead of a conventional briefing. That decision followed a standard reporting constraint. Without returned articles, URLs or replacement material, the briefing could not attribute any new claim about battlefield conditions in Ukraine, policy moves in Beijing or shifts in the U.S. campaign. ### What can an operator check next? Exa’s billing documentation says users can review remaining credits, charges and invoices on the dashboard billing page. The company’s pricing page also lists per-request rates for search and related products, while its x402 documentation describes the headers required when using payment-based access instead of API-key billing. Exa’s current documentation pages on pricing, billing and x402 access are the next places to check for anyone trying to determine why a September 2 search returned “402” instead of results. (exa.ai)