Ecosia

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

Where Ecosia's results actually come from — and why that changed in 2025

Almost everything written about Ecosia says it is Bing with a tree counter attached. That was a fair description for most of the engine's life. It is out of date, and the correction is the single most important fact on this page.

As of August 2026, Ecosia's own help centre names three sources for the results and the ads on them: Microsoft Bing, Google, and EUSP — European Search Perspective. The third of those is not a syndication partner. It is a company Ecosia owns half of, which runs a crawler, holds an index of its own, and has been answering live Ecosia queries since August 2025.

That is what moves Ecosia from resold results to hybrid index. The distinction is not cosmetic. A pure reseller has nothing if its supplier withdraws; it contributes no new crawling to the world, and its results can only ever be as good or as bad as the engine behind it. A part-owner of an index is building capacity. Ecosia is now the only consumer-scale mission-driven engine that has done the second thing rather than settling permanently for the first.

Two qualifications keep this honest. First, the majority of Ecosia's results still come from Microsoft and Google — the own-index share is a minority and is concentrated in France and Germany. Second, Ecosia publishes no per-query breakdown, and the relative weight of Bing versus Google in the blend is not disclosed either. A user cannot tell which of the three answered any given search.

Staan and EUSP: what Ecosia and Qwant actually built

European Search Perspective SAS (EUSP) is a 50:50 joint venture between Ecosia and the French engine Qwant, announced on 11–12 November 2024 and headquartered in Paris. Its chief executive is Olivier Abecassis, who is also chief executive of Qwant; Qwant's engineering team moved into the new entity.

The corporate structure is deliberate and revealing. EUSP was incorporated as a separate commercial company specifically so that it can raise outside capital — something Ecosia's steward-ownership structure prevents it from doing on its own balance sheet. Building a web-scale index is enormously expensive, and this is how a company that has legally given up the ability to sell equity in itself finances one anyway.

The index is called Staan — Search Trusted API Access Network. It went live on 6–7 August 2025, serving real traffic for both Qwant and Ecosia, starting in France. EUSP's stated pitch is that it can offer search features at roughly a tenth of the cost of the equivalent from Google or Bing, and it is aimed at AI and chatbot developers who need web grounding data as much as at its two parent engines. That second market matters: an index that only served Qwant and Ecosia would struggle to justify its cost, and the framing throughout has been European digital sovereignty — reducing the continent's dependence on two American indexes.

On the rollout, the sources conflict, and both belong on the record. Ecosia's own launch blog post of 7 August 2025 states a target of 30% of French search queries by the end of 2025. TechCrunch, reporting on 6 August 2025, states a target of 50% of French queries and 33% of German queries by the same date. The earlier November 2024 announcement described a first-quarter 2025 launch in France and a significant portion of German traffic by the end of that year, with English-language support to follow.

Those are targets. What share Staan has actually reached is not published, and no primary source states what percentage of Ecosia queries it answers today or in which countries. A target is not an achievement, and this page will not report one as the other. Nor is there published documentation of the crawler's user-agent token, so a site operator who wants to allow or block the EUSP crawl has nothing official to work from — an unusual gap for a production crawler and one worth watching.

Who owns Ecosia, and why the answer is unusual

Ecosia GmbH is based in Berlin and was founded in December 2009 by Christian Kroll. In October 2018 Kroll transferred his shares into a steward-ownership structure with the Purpose Foundation, permanently surrendering both the right to sell the company and the right to take profits or dividends out of it.

This deserves more weight than a governance footnote usually gets, because it is the mechanism that makes everything else on this page credible. Ecosia cannot be acquired and cannot pay out to shareholders. The surplus is spent on the mission by legal structure rather than by promise. Every purpose-driven startup says its values are permanent; a great many have subsequently sold to private equity and quietly rewritten them. Ecosia has removed its own ability to do that.

Two clarifications a reader often needs. Ecosia is not a charity or a non-profit — it is a German limited company with a foundation holding a veto share, which in some respects is a stronger constraint than a non-profit registration and in others is simply a different one. And Christian Kroll does not profit from Ecosia; he gave up that right in 2018.

How the money works, and what the trees actually mean

The business model is search advertising, most of it arriving through the syndication partners — Microsoft Advertising alongside Bing, and Google. The distinctive part is where the surplus goes.

The last clearly published split, from 2021, was 80% of profits to tree planting, which Ecosia characterised as 47.1% of total income. Those are 2021 figures and should be read as such. Ecosia reported revenue of approximately €43.2 million for 2023; no later audited figure was confirmed for this page. Ecosia publishes monthly financial reports, which is genuinely rare and is a real accountability mechanism rather than a gesture.

On the trees themselves: Ecosia reached 250 million around Earth Day in April 2026, having passed 100 million in July 2020, 150 million in June 2022, and 230 million — its original stated goal — in 2025. On reaching 250 million it publicly widened its mission from tree counting toward broader landscape restoration.

Two honest caveats. Ecosia funds planting through partner organisations rather than running nurseries itself, and the count is self-reported through those partners rather than attested by an independent auditor. Ecosia publishes its partner lists and its monthly financials, which is more than most, but that is not the same as third-party verification of the number. And the familiar "every N searches plants a tree" line no longer reflects how Ecosia describes itself, because the ratio depends on advertising revenue per search, which varies by country and over time. Any fixed number quoted without a date and a source should be treated as wrong.

Privacy: a climate engine, not an anonymity tool

The most common mistake made about Ecosia is filing it with the privacy engines. Ecosia has never claimed to be one, and reading it as a substitute for a hardened anonymity tool will lead a user astray.

What Ecosia states: it does not build personal profiles for ad targeting, does not sell user data, anonymises searches, and does not run external tracking tools on its own properties. Its servers are in the EU and run on renewable energy, and the GDPR applies to it as a German company. That is decent hygiene and a good jurisdiction.

What limits it: a large share of queries is fulfilled by Microsoft and Google, which means those queries necessarily leave Ecosia's infrastructure and reach a US company's servers. Ecosia's position is that they are anonymised before hand-off. No independent audit verifying that anonymisation was located for this page, so the strength of Ecosia's privacy is exactly the strength of a claim the user cannot check. When a query is served from Staan instead, it stays within EU-owned infrastructure — which is one of the quieter arguments for the whole EUSP project.

Documented criticism: a 2021 Ethical Consumer review flagged transparency gaps about the depth of the Microsoft relationship. Third-party components on the results page — Mapbox for maps, Skyscanner for flights, Tripadvisor for restaurants, Wikimedia for knowledge panels — have also been raised as data-flow concerns. These are widgets rather than the web index, but they are still third parties on the page.

Ecosia has been B Corp certified since April 2014, the first German company to be. That is a genuine third-party certification, and it assesses social and environmental performance. It says nothing about privacy engineering and should never be cited as though it did.

AI features

Ecosia Chat is a conversational assistant built into the engine. It was originally built on the OpenAI API, with chat data retained by OpenAI for 30 days and not used for model training. Ecosia is reported to have moved it to a Mistral model in May 2026 — a French provider, consistent with the European-sovereignty argument running through everything else the company has done recently. That switch is reported via a secondary source rather than an Ecosia announcement, and should be treated as such.

Ecosia also offers green answers, a mode that surfaces climate- and sustainability-oriented responses. Its AI features are presented as opt-in tools rather than a mandatory generated block above every set of results, though whether a hard, persistent off switch exists for every AI surface could not be confirmed for this page.

The more strategically interesting AI story is the other direction. EUSP is explicitly pitched at AI companies that need web data to ground their models. Ecosia's most significant relationship with AI may end up being as an input to other people's systems rather than as the operator of its own chatbot.

How big it actually is

Ecosia's cultural profile is much larger than its query share, and the figures deserve to be stated plainly rather than implied away.

By StatCounter-derived compilations, Ecosia held roughly 0.29% of European search requests in January 2023, about 0.30% in Europe and 0.09% globally in 2024, and roughly 0.10–0.15% globally in 2025. Those are approximate and secondary; a precise figure should be taken from StatCounter's own published series. Ecosia has reported around 20 million monthly active users worldwide, a self-reported figure given at the time of the November 2024 EUSP announcement.

So: a small engine by volume, a large one by recognition, and — through its half of EUSP — a disproportionately significant one in terms of infrastructure. Very few organisations anywhere are adding a new general web index to the world. As of August 2026 Ecosia is halfway to being one of them.

Who it suits, and who it does not

It suits a reader who wants their everyday searching to fund something, and who wants that funding backed by a structure rather than a slogan. The steward-ownership arrangement, the monthly financial reporting and the B Corp certification together make Ecosia the most credible mission-driven engine available. It also suits anyone who cares about European technological independence: buying into EUSP is a materially different act from putting a green skin on Bing, and Ecosia is one of only two owners of the result.

It is a poor choice for anyone selecting an engine primarily for privacy. Ecosia does not compete on that axis, forwards a large share of queries to Microsoft and Google, and has no independent audit of its anonymisation. A reader whose first concern is surveillance should be looking at engines built for that purpose.

It is also a poor fit for anyone who needs to know where a result came from. The Bing/Google/Staan blend is undisclosed per query, so provenance is unavailable — a real limitation for professional research. And anyone who objects on principle to routing queries through Microsoft and Google should note that most Ecosia queries still are, for now.

On quality: because most results are Bing's and Google's, Ecosia is broadly as good as those engines, and slightly less predictable in the markets where Staan is being substituted in. A young index is a young index. The trade a user is making is a small amount of consistency in exchange for funding a mission and, increasingly, funding an alternative to the duopoly's infrastructure.

Frequently asked questions

Does Ecosia use Bing?

Yes, but no longer only Bing. As of August 2026 Ecosia's own help centre names three result providers: Microsoft Bing, Google, and EUSP — the European Search Perspective joint venture Ecosia co-owns with Qwant, whose Staan index has been serving live queries since August 2025. Ecosia does not publish the split between the three, so the proportion answered by each is not knowable from outside.

Does Ecosia have its own search index?

It half-owns one. Ecosia does not operate a crawler under its own name, but it holds 50% of European Search Perspective, the Paris company that built and runs the Staan index. Staan went live in August 2025 and answers a growing share of Ecosia's queries, starting in France and extending to Germany. That co-ownership is why Ecosia counts as a hybrid rather than a pure reseller.

What is Staan?

Staan — Search Trusted API Access Network — is a European web index built by European Search Perspective, the 50:50 joint venture Ecosia and Qwant announced in November 2024. It went live on 6–7 August 2025, serving real traffic for both engines beginning in France. EUSP also sells index access to third parties, particularly AI developers who need web data to ground their models.

Who owns Ecosia?

Ecosia GmbH is steward-owned. Founder Christian Kroll transferred his shares to the Purpose Foundation in October 2018, permanently giving up both the right to sell the company and the right to take profits or dividends from it. Ecosia cannot be acquired and cannot pay shareholders. It is not a charity or non-profit — it is a German limited company with a foundation holding a veto share.

Is Ecosia a privacy search engine?

Not primarily, and it has never claimed to be. Ecosia is a climate company that runs a search engine. It has reasonable privacy hygiene — no personal ad-targeting profiles, no data sales, EU servers, GDPR coverage — but a large share of queries is still fulfilled by Microsoft and Google and therefore leaves its infrastructure. Ecosia says those are anonymised first; no independent audit of that was found.

How many trees has Ecosia planted?

Ecosia reached 250 million trees funded around Earth Day in April 2026, after 100 million in July 2020, 150 million in June 2022 and 230 million in 2025. It funds planting through partner organisations rather than running nurseries itself, and the count is self-reported through those partners rather than independently audited. On reaching 250 million it widened its stated mission to landscape restoration.

How many searches does it take to plant a tree?

There is no fixed number, and Ecosia has moved away from that framing. The ratio depends on how much advertising revenue a search generates, which varies by country, by query and over time. Any specific searches-per-tree figure quoted without a date and a source should be treated as unreliable. What Ecosia does publish is monthly financial reporting showing where the money actually went.

Is Ecosia owned by Google or Microsoft?

No. Ecosia is an independent Berlin company held under steward-ownership with the Purpose Foundation, and it cannot be sold. Its commercial relationship with Microsoft and Google is a supply arrangement: it buys search results and ad inventory from them. It also owns half of a competing index, EUSP, which is explicitly framed as reducing European dependence on those same two companies.