Is Ecosia ethical?
Ethical Consumer's research looked at digital privacy concerns, climate impact, company ethos, and more, when reviewing search engines and web browsers.
Ecosia is often presented as the 'green' or eco friendly search engine. We look at if the evidence supports this.
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What is Ecosia?
Ecosia is a search engine and also a web browser.
Is Ecosia a good search engine?
How 'good' Ecosia is depends on the definition of good. In terms of good ethics, it scores well in both the search engine and web browser guide.
In terms of accuracy of results as a search engine, like many search engines Ecosia uses Google and Microsoft's Bing to return answers, so results are generally as accurate as if you'd used those search engines.
Is Ecosia safe?
Ethical Consumer's unique digital privacy rating assesses companies for how much data they gather about someone one using the search engine or web browser.
Ecosia is registered in Germany, which means your data is protected by the European Union’s strong privacy laws.
Ecosia scored much higher than Google and reasonable well for digital privacy overall.
Is Ecosia legit or greenwashing?
Ecosia is often known as the ‘search engine that plants trees’.
It publishes all the information about its tree planting on its website, which currently stands at over 245 million trees globally.
It is also a B-corp and has its own solar energy plant which powers its servers. It claims to produce twice as much solar power than is needed to power all Ecosia searches and feeds the rest into the energy grid.
Its green and eco-friendly credentials are therefore legitimate and not greenwashing.
Does Ecosia actually plant trees
Yes, Ecosia plants trees globally through money raised from adverts.
Detailed information about its tree planting can be found on its website.
Does Ecosia use AI?
Ecosia does use AI, currently French company Mistral.
You can choose AI-free searching by changing your Ecosia account settings.
How does Ecosia make money?
Ecosia’s revenue largely comes from advertisements. The adverts are generated by Microsoft Advertising and Google Adsense, and when you click on one Ecosia receives a share of the revenue generated by the click (and the rest of the revenue generated from the click goes to Microsoft or Google).
If you use the search engine but don’t click on ads, Ecosia won’t make any money and therefore won't be planting any additional trees. It is the ad revenue that enables them to plant trees.
Is Ecosia better than Google?
Ecosia scores much higher than Google in the search engine and web browser guides.
It is much stronger on digital privacy, climate, company ethics, tax conduct and workers' rights.
To read more about Ecosia see the separate feature article.
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Research on Ecosia was conducted in April 2026.