Qwant

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

Where Qwant's results come from

Qwant is a general-purpose search engine operated from France, positioned around privacy and European digital sovereignty. It returns a conventional results page — web, images, news, maps — with no behavioural tracking and no third-party cookies. Getting its result sourcing right requires describing three layers, because any account with fewer than three is wrong.

First, its own crawler and index. Qwant operates a crawler called Qwantbot, which fetches pages from the open web so Qwant can store and rank them itself. In September 2023 the company stated that its index held around 20 billion web pages and that its crawlers covered more than a billion pages a day, claiming the largest indexing capacity in Europe. Those figures are self-reported, they date from September 2023, and no independent verification of them exists — all three qualifiers should travel with the numbers wherever they are quoted.

Second, Microsoft Bing, as a supplement. In Qwant's own words, it uses Bing "to supplement search results on which we do not have sufficient relevance, and on images where storage capacities are very important." In the same 2023 post Qwant published a self-measured comparison: 51% of its results were identical to Bing's, meaning 49% differed. That is the closest thing to a published independence measure Qwant has ever offered. It too is self-reported, and no more recent measurement was found for this page.

Third, Staan. Since August 2025 Qwant has also served results from Staan, the index built by European Search Perspective (EUSP), the Paris joint venture Qwant co-owns with Ecosia. Wikipedia records Qwant using Staan specifically to ground AI summaries. What share of Qwant's queries Staan answers today is not published; only targets are, and a target is not an achievement.

So the accurate formulation is: Qwant crawls and indexes the web itself, and has done since roughly 2020, but supplements with Bing exactly where its own index is weakest, and now also draws on an index it half-owns. Hybrid, not independent.

The 2019 finding, and why it still matters

From its 2013 launch, Qwant marketed itself as an independent European search engine with its own index. In early 2019 an investigation by the French technology publication Next INpact found that this was not true: Qwant was completely reliant on Bing for web and image search, and at that time operated neither its own crawler nor its own indexer.

This belongs on the page as a fact rather than as an accusation, and it is worth being precise about why it matters rather than simply noting that it happened. Qwant had raised money on the strength of the independence claim, including a €25 million loan from the European Investment Bank in October 2016 and a €15 million investment from Caisse des Dépôts, a French state investment arm, in February 2017. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces had switched to it in October 2018. A national-sovereignty argument was being made about infrastructure that did not exist.

The company's posture changed afterwards, and to its credit it changed in the direction of candour. In 2020 Qwant said it had passed 50% independent results for web search. In September 2023 it published index figures and the Bing-overlap measurement, and framed full independence as a gradual goal rather than an achieved state — a markedly more honest framing than 2019's.

The practical consequence for a reader is this: Qwant's self-descriptions are unaudited, and they have been materially wrong before. That is not a reason to disregard them. It is a reason to treat the 20-billion-page figure as a company claim rather than as a measured fact, and to want independent verification before repeating it as one.

Staan and EUSP: the European index

European Search Perspective SAS is a 50:50 joint venture between Qwant and Ecosia, announced on 11–12 November 2024 and headquartered in Paris. Qwant's engineering team moved into it, and Olivier Abecassis is chief executive of both companies. Its index, Staan, went live on 6–7 August 2025, serving real traffic for both parent engines starting in France, with TechCrunch's launch coverage citing targets of 50% of French queries and 33% of German queries by the end of 2025.

The proximate cause was commercial. In 2023 Microsoft raised Bing API pricing sharply, which changed the economics for every engine dependent on that feed. EUSP is the response: rather than negotiate better terms, two of Microsoft's syndication customers pooled their engineering into an index of their own, pitched at roughly a tenth of the cost of the incumbents' equivalents and aimed at AI developers needing grounding data as much as at Qwant and Ecosia themselves.

Two things should not be merged. Staan is not Qwant's index. Qwant has its own, separate index built by Qwantbot; Staan is a separate company's index that Qwant half-owns and draws on. An account that collapses the two overstates Qwant's independent capability and understates what EUSP is.

Who owns Qwant

Qwant was founded on 25 May 2011 in Nice by Jean-Manuel Rozan, Éric Léandri and Patrick Constant, entered public beta in February 2013 across 15 countries and 35 languages, and launched officially on 4 July 2013.

Its cap table has turned over repeatedly. Axel Springer took a 20% stake in June 2014. The European Investment Bank lent €25 million in October 2016. Caisse des Dépôts invested €15 million for 20% in February 2017. None of those parties owns it now.

Since 4 July 2023, Qwant has been owned by Synfonium, a holding company created a month earlier and owned roughly 75% by Octave and Miroslaw Klaba — the founders of the French cloud provider OVHcloud, through Jezby Ventures and Deep Code — and roughly 25% by Banque des Territoires / Caisse des Dépôts, the French state investment arm. The purchase price was €14 million. Synfonium also owns the cloud-gaming company Shadow.

Two corrections follow from that. Qwant is not owned by Axel Springer, and it is not state-owned — a state investment arm holds a minority position in its parent, which is a different thing. That minority position is still worth surfacing on a page about a privacy engine, whatever a reader concludes from it: French state money sits on the ownership structure, which insulates Qwant from acquisition by a US buyer and simultaneously ties it to a government.

Synfonium's stated purpose is broader than search — a European ecosystem gathering a search engine, a collaborative cloud suite competing with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, a social network and other services. Qwant is a component of a sovereignty-branded cloud group rather than a standalone search business, and its future is bound up in whether that larger strategy works.

Privacy, and what has actually been verified

Qwant states that it does no behavioural tracking, sets no third-party cookies, builds no advertising profiles and does not sell personal data; that its hosting is European; and that search works without an account. Its advertising is sold against the query rather than against a profile.

Some of that is structural and some is a claim, and the difference matters. Structural: Qwant is a French company under EU jurisdiction and the GDPR, without direct US CLOUD Act exposure at the operating entity. A claim: everything about what Qwant does with the queries it holds. No independent technical audit of Qwant's data handling was located in the research for this page, and given the 2019 history, the absence of one is worth naming rather than glossing.

One caveat is concrete. Queries that Qwant supplements with Bing reach Microsoft, a US company. Qwant's position is that these are proxied without user identifiers. That is Qwant's account of its own plumbing, not a verified finding — and by Qwant's own description these are the hard queries, the ones where its index is weakest, which means the searches a user most cares about are the ones most likely to have travelled.

The European Parliament's adoption of Qwant in June 2026 followed an institutional assessment framed around reducing reliance on non-EU digital tools and promoting European privacy-focused services. That is a meaningful institutional endorsement. It is also a political and procurement decision rather than a technical privacy audit, and it should not be cited as though a security assessment had been published.

AI features

Réponse Flash, launched in January 2026, is Qwant's experimental AI summary. Its distinguishing feature is the design intent: it summarises while explicitly steering users toward visiting the source websites, and it was developed in partnership with more than twenty media outlets. That is a deliberate contrast with generated answers that absorb the traffic publishers depend on, and it is a defensible editorial position rather than only a public-relations one.

The more notable fact is what Qwant does not do. As of June 2026, Qwant does not display AI-generated answers by default. In a year when most major engines put a generated block above the links whether or not the user asked for one, an engine that shows results first is a genuine differentiator, and for some readers it will be the deciding feature.

Qwant uses the Staan index to ground its AI summaries, which is part of EUSP's broader argument that a European index can supply grounding data to European AI products. Which underlying language model powers Réponse Flash, and whether it belongs to Qwant, to EUSP or to a third party, could not be established from a primary source for this page.

How big it is, and how that has moved

Two data points tell the commercial story better than any percentage. In June 2018 Qwant was described as the second most-used search engine in France. By the first half of 2020 it was fourth, behind Google, Bing and Yahoo. That is a sharp fall, and it happened either side of the 2019 index revelation.

Qwant reported around 6 million monthly users in France in 2024, a self-reported figure given in the coverage of the EUSP announcement. No current StatCounter percentage was confirmed for this page; StatCounter does not consistently break Qwant out in its published global series, and any figure should be taken directly from StatCounter with its date rather than from a secondary write-up. Qwant's share of French search has never approached Google's, which holds the overwhelming majority of queries in France.

The financial history is fragile. Qwant lost €23.5 million in 2019. A restructuring announced in June 2020, including office closures required by major shareholders, cut losses to €13 million on net sales up 28% to €7.5 million. The company was then sold in 2023 for €14 million — a modest price for an engine that had absorbed a €25 million loan and a €15 million investment in the preceding decade.

Institutional adoption gives Qwant visibility well beyond its consumer share. The French government made it the default across its devices in January 2020, and on 4 June 2026 the European Parliament made it the default search engine in Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox for its 720 MEPs plus assistants and administrative staff, replacing Google; users may still switch manually. Parliament framed the change as reducing reliance on non-EU digital tools — a sovereignty decision, not a finding that Qwant is technically superior.

Who it suits, and who it does not

It suits a reader who wants a European engine that genuinely crawls the web, who prefers not to have an AI answer imposed on every search, and who values EU jurisdiction. Qwant is one of a very small number of organisations indexing the open web outside the United States, China and Russia, and with Ecosia it has put money and engineering into Staan rather than simply complaining about Bing's pricing. On sovereignty grounds it is one of the few consumer choices that changes anything structurally.

It is a poor choice for research that depends on deep long-tail recall, and for work outside French. The supplementation arrangement means the hardest queries are the ones most likely to be answered by Microsoft, which is precisely inverted from what an independence-minded user would want. Cybernews' June 2026 testing also found basic gaps against Google — notably knowledge panels with business hours, reviews and contact details — so anyone who relies on local and business information will find it thin.

It is also a poor choice for anyone who treats a privacy engine's self-reported claims as sufficient assurance. Qwant's claims have been wrong before, in a documented and consequential way, and they remain unaudited.

The fair summary: a genuine and structurally important European index with a real crawler and a coherent strategy, attached to a company with a poor historical record of describing itself accurately and a persistently weak balance sheet. Worth supporting on sovereignty grounds; worth checking on factual ones.

Frequently asked questions

Does Qwant have its own index?

Yes, and it also uses other people's. Qwant runs a crawler called Qwantbot and stated in September 2023 that its own index held around 20 billion pages, crawled at more than a billion pages a day — self-reported figures with no independent verification. It supplements that index with Microsoft Bing where its relevance is weak and for images, and since August 2025 with Staan, the index it half-owns through EUSP.

Does Qwant use Bing?

Yes, as a supplement. Qwant's own published statement is that it uses Bing for results where it does not have sufficient relevance of its own, and for images, where storage requirements are heavy. In 2023 Qwant measured 51% of its results as identical to Bing's, meaning 49% differed. That figure is self-reported and from 2023; no more recent measurement has been published.

Was Qwant caught faking its own index?

In early 2019 an investigation found Qwant had neither its own crawler nor its own indexer and was wholly reliant on Bing for web and image search, while marketing itself as an independent European engine. It had raised public money on that positioning, including a European Investment Bank loan. Qwant has since built a real crawler and adopted more measured language, but the episode is why its unaudited claims warrant scrutiny.

Who owns Qwant?

Since 4 July 2023, Synfonium — a holding company owned roughly 75% by Octave and Miroslaw Klaba, founders of OVHcloud, and roughly 25% by Banque des Territoires / Caisse des Dépôts, the French state investment arm. The price was €14 million. Qwant is not state-owned; a state arm holds a minority stake in its parent. Axel Springer, a 20% holder from 2014, is no longer an owner.

Is Qwant the European Parliament's search engine?

Yes. From 4 June 2026 Qwant became the default search engine in Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox for the European Parliament's 720 MEPs plus their assistants and administrative staff, replacing Google. Users can still switch manually. Parliament framed the change around reducing reliance on non-EU digital tools, so it is a sovereignty and procurement decision rather than a technical assessment of result quality.

Does Qwant show AI answers?

Not by default, as confirmed in independent testing in June 2026. Qwant launched an experimental AI summary called Réponse Flash in January 2026, built with more than twenty media partners and designed to steer readers toward the source websites rather than absorb their traffic. It is grounded on the Staan index. The absence of a forced AI block above results is one of Qwant's clearer differentiators.

Is Staan Qwant's own index?

No, and the two should not be confused. Staan is built and run by European Search Perspective, a separate Paris company that is a 50:50 joint venture between Qwant and Ecosia, announced in November 2024 and live from August 2025. Qwant is a co-owner and a user of Staan, and separately operates its own index built by Qwantbot. They are two different indexes.

Is Qwant private?

Qwant states it does no behavioural tracking, sets no third-party cookies, builds no ad profiles and sells no personal data, and it operates under French and EU law with European hosting. The jurisdiction is a structural fact; the data-handling statements are company claims, and no independent technical audit of them was found. Queries supplemented by Bing do reach Microsoft, proxied according to Qwant without user identifiers.