How to research target accounts with Exa

You research target accounts with Exa by turning your ideal customer profile into a plain-language description, running it through Exa's company search, and then reading each company's own pages to confirm it really fits. Target accounts are the specific companies your sales and marketing team has decided to pursue, and the research is what turns a broad profile like "mid-size healthcare companies" into a named list you can act on.

Exa is a search engine built for AI agents. It searches by meaning instead of matching keywords, so a request for "multi-location physical therapy practices that let patients book online" returns the practices' own websites rather than directory listings and health articles. Its company category limits the results to company sites, and each result comes back with its address, highlights, and, if you ask, the page's full text or a summary. You can run these searches through Exa's API, or you can use Websets, Exa's app for building lists. A Webset takes a description and a set of criteria, checks every match against each criterion, and can add columns such as headcount or notable clients.

That's a strong starting point, and Websets in particular already does part of the checking for you. What Exa can't do is decide what to look for. It doesn't know which of your customers are your best ones, what they have in common, which companies are already customers or competitors, or what makes this month a good time to reach out to a given account. It also stops at the company. Finding the person to contact, getting a working email, and putting the list where sales will use it are separate jobs.

A good result is a short list of companies that match your profile on the traits that matter, each with the evidence for that match, a reason to reach out now, and the person worth contacting. Kite does that work for you, using Exa for the searching and reading and its other sources for the rest.

Start by asking Kite for the accounts you want. A short request is enough:

"Find 50 companies that look like our best customers and tell me why each one belongs on the list."

Or you can describe the market yourself:

"Research US agencies that build Shopify stores for beauty brands. I want ones with at least 20 people and a published client list."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. By the time you ask, it already knows your positioning, your current customers, and your competitors from that research, so it can propose the description it plans to search with and the criteria each account has to meet. Confirm them or adjust them, and Kite starts.

You don't need an Exa account. Exa is built into Kite and runs on Kite's own Exa account, so there's nothing to connect before Kite searches. If you want the results to live in your own Exa account as a Webset, you can add your own Exa API key.

Kite writes the search around the traits your best customers share that show up on their own websites, because that's what Exa is best at finding. Size, industry, and location still matter, but a sales database can already filter on those. The traits that separate a good account from an average one are usually more specific: a company that publishes its pricing, runs a partner program, hires for a role your product replaces, or serves a niche your customers have in common.

Kite drafts these descriptions from the research it did on your business, including your positioning, your current customers, and the problems your product solves. It writes each trait as something a company would say about itself, such as "offers same-day delivery in three or more cities," instead of a label like "logistics-forward retailer." It usually writes several versions of the description, because different phrasings reach different companies. It also turns your profile into a short checklist of criteria, which it uses in the next steps to decide whether each company fits.

Kite runs Exa's company search with each description and collects the matches into one list of candidates. Each search returns up to 100 companies, and Kite runs as many searches as the job needs, combining the results and removing any company that appears twice. When you want accounts in a particular part of the market, Kite can limit a search to certain websites, such as a marketplace's partner directory or an industry association's member list.

Before it reads anything closely, Kite removes the companies you shouldn't pursue. That means your existing customers, your competitors, and any company you've told Kite to leave out. When your CRM is connected, Kite can check its company records by domain so it doesn't bring back accounts your team already owns.

Kite confirms the fit by reading each company's own pages and checking them against your criteria one by one. Through Exa, it reads up to 20 pages at a time, such as a company's homepage, pricing page, about page, careers page, and customer stories. It can ask for the current version of each page, so a company that changed its business last month is judged on what it does today.

For each criterion, Kite records whether the company meets it and keeps the page that shows it. A company that meets every criterion stays on the list. One that misses a criterion that matters, such as a services firm that turned out to be a software company, comes off. When a page doesn't answer a question, Kite marks that criterion as unconfirmed rather than guessing, so you can see which parts of the fit are proven and which are inferred.

This step is where most of the list's value comes from. A company that matched the search but fails on its own website would waste a salesperson's time, and the page Kite keeps lets anyone check the reasoning in one click.

Kite looks for recent events at each account that give you a reason to get in touch this month instead of next quarter. It runs Exa's news search for each company, limited to the dates you care about, and looks for moments such as a funding round, a new marketing leader, a product launch, an acquisition, or an expansion into a new region. Every story comes back with its headline, date, and link.

Kite can add funding and hiring details from its other built-in sources, such as Crustdata and PredictLeads, when the news search comes up thin. An account with a timely event moves up the list, and the event becomes the opening line of any outreach Kite writes later.

Kite uses Exa's people search to find who holds the role you sell to at each company, along with their public LinkedIn profile and the page that names them. That page is often the company's own team or about page. Kite records each person's name, title, LinkedIn profile, and source, and it checks that the person still holds the role.

Exa finds people but doesn't verify email addresses, so Kite passes each name and company to its built-in contact sources, such as Apollo, to find a work email. It keeps each email's verification status exactly as the source returns it, and a missing email stays marked as not found.

Kite scores every account from one to five against your criteria and writes a one-line reason for the score. A reason reads like this: "Runs 14 clinics across three states, takes bookings online, and just hired a head of growth." When the list runs past about fifteen accounts, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so your team knows where to start.

If fewer companies qualify than you asked for, Kite tells you how many it found and which criteria knocked the rest out. That's useful in itself, because a criterion that eliminates almost everyone is often one worth loosening.

When the research is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked, along with the full account list as a table. The summary says how many companies it found, how many passed the fit check, how many it removed and why, and how many have a named contact with a work email.

From there, Kite can put the list wherever your team works. With your CRM connected, it creates each company record with its domain, industry, employee count, and location, adds the fit score and reason, and attaches the contacts it found. It can also write the list to a connected spreadsheet. Kite can draft a personalized outreach email for each primary contact that opens with the account's recent event, and it asks for your approval before anything is sent.

If you want new accounts as they appear, ask Kite to rerun the research on a schedule, such as every Monday, and it brings each batch of new companies back to the same place. With your own Exa key connected, Kite can instead build the list as a Webset in your Exa account and attach a monitor, so Exa reruns the search as often as once a day and adds new matches for your team to open in Exa.

When Kite finishes, you have a researched list of target accounts that sales can start working right away, with the evidence for every decision attached.