Ecosia

Ecosia is a search engine whose advertising revenue pays for climate work. It works like a conventional search engine, but profits go to tree-planting and ecosystem restoration rather than to shareholders, and the company publishes a financial report every month showing what it earned and what it spent. It is a not-for-profit company, steward-owned since 2018, so no owner, the founder included, can sell it or take money out of it. Results are supplemented by AI answers that the company says run on smaller, more energy-efficient models, and all AI features can be switched off by the user.

The company reports more than 250 million trees planted together with local communities, roughly 20 million people using Ecosia, over 900 native species planted instead of monocultures, work in 35+ countries and 70+ active projects, and about EUR 101 million dedicated to climate action. Its own solar plants generate twice the renewable energy its searches consume, which the company describes as making each search carbon-negative. It does not track users, and publishes monthly financial reports and daily field updates. In 2026 Ecosia began serving EU-sourced (EUSP) results in Germany and published its media licensing agreement with publishers, part of a stated move towards European digital sovereignty.

Ecosia was founded in December 2009 by Christian Kroll, who launched it from his Berlin apartment as what the company calls the world's first not-for-profit search engine, and it is still based in Berlin. Its help documentation records that it became Germany's first certified B Corp in 2014. The engine is proprietary and vendor-hosted, with no self-hosted version, so the climate claim rests on where the money goes rather than on the code.