Communicating in line with the European Directive on Consumer Empowerment

The EU Empowering Consumers Directive (EmpCo) is introducing new and stricter rules for how companies communicate their efforts about sustainability. The directive aims to ensure consumers receive accurate, trustworthy information about the environmental and social footprint of the products they purchase, while also creating fairer conditions for brands that are genuinely committed to sustainability.

At Ecosia, being transparent is one of our core values. This article gives an overview of our core claims related to our products and word and aims to clarify how we’re coming to our statements.  

100 % of Ecosia’s profits go into climate action

Ecosia has been steward-owned since 2018. The company's financial equity sits with the Purpose Foundation, a non-profit foundation, and founder Christian Kroll and Ecosia's early investors gave up the right to ever sell the company.

As a purpose-ownership company, Ecosia cannot pay profit out to shareholders. Under our agreement with the Purpose Foundation, profit is either spent on ecological and public-good purposes outside Ecosia's operations, such as tree planting and renewable energy investment, or reinvested in Ecosia to grow the reach and impact of its climate work. Because Ecosia exists to fund climate action, both paths serve that purpose. That's what we mean by "100% of profit goes into climate action."

By "profit" we mean what remains of our revenue after deducting operational costs, investments and taxes. We publish our financial reports every month, with a plain-language summary of where our money went. 

Learn more about steward-ownership in Ecosia's Purpose Foundation company profile.

Ecosia’s impact: About treeplanting, biodiversity and social indicators of projects 

Ecosia funds tree-planting projects around the world. You can see where we plant and have planted on our project pages. Our monthly financial reports list which partners we funded.

A tree counts as planted by Ecosia once a second field monitoring, three years after planting, confirms it's alive.

Ecosia works with established organisations in multiple regions. Each organisation submitted a project proposal that shows how it plans to protect and restore ecosystems in its region. All partners follow our monitoring requirements. We fund projects that:

• protect existing trees or plant new ones
• are located where former forests were lost
• use a diverse, mostly native tree species selection
• plant without chemical fertilisers or pesticides
• are not carbon-offset projects
• involve local communities, through employment or in-kind contributions

We focus our funding activities on biodiversity hotspots, which are defined by Conservation international as critical habitats for unique species that are at severe risk of disappearing. This map by Global Forest Watch is visualizing where these precious areas are around the world. 

We believe long-term ecological restoration depends on the people who do the work on the ground. That's why we fund partners who work with local communities and aim to equip them to care for the trees. Every year, we survey our partner organisations on social indicators, such as employment types, in-kind contribution, women involved in their projects. 

Following this approach in these regions Ecosia contributes to preserving ecosystems and bringing back biodiversity together with local communities. 

How we ensure the output, outcome and impact of our projects 

For us, output of our projects is the direct, tangible services or products delivered by our project partners. We formalize our projects by a standardised process: Every project runs on an investment contract or a service contract. They set what the partner delivers: 

• Service contracts are an agreement between Ecosia and the partner in which both parties agree on how many trees the partner will plant and at what price. We pay the partner for their tree-planting services in intervals and closely monitor progress throughout the different stages of the project. Ecosia does not own the planted trees, but in return we own the claim to have planted the trees that have been financed by Ecosia. 
• Investment contracts are projects that aim to conserve or increase tree cover and where expect a financial return. The aim is to set up a revolving fund system and finance new projects with the return-of-investment.

The outcome of our projects is what happens to the trees after planting, whether they survive, and how areas further develop. We monitor the sites where our partners plant in multiple ways:

• Partner reporting: Under their contracts, partners send us geo-tagged photos, location coordinates, and data on the trees: height, diameter, species and density. Partners upload the data via the mobile app Akvo. We store this information in an internal database. 
• Site visits: We visit project partners in the first and the third year to cross-check the data partners send us. On small sites, we count every tree and record species. On larger sites with hundreds of trees, we sample instead of counting every tree. We normally use the point-centered quadrat method (PCQ).
• Satellite imagery: We use it to monitor projects remotely. It doesn't replace monitoring on site.

When we refer to the positive impact of our projects we refer to the long-term change to which our projects aim towards. We fund tree planting and forest protection because we expect healthy ecosystems to benefit the climate. This is an expectation, not a measurement. We don't calculate CO2 reductions for our projects, and they aren't certified for carbon offsetting.

Biodiversity standard

We co-developed the Biodiversity Standard, a comprehensive framework providing independent assurance on biodiversity outcomes in nature-based restoration projects and programmes.

Ecosia’s energy consumption, carbon footprint and investments into renewable energy

Since 2017, Ecosia has invested in renewable energy infrastructure: solar and photovoltaic systems in Germany, with our partner Naturstrom AG. In 2025, based on our internal metering data, these systems generated 9,127 MWh. 

Up until 2022 Ecosia used the service of Climate Partner, an external auditor to assess its operations emissions according to the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. Since then we assess our operational emissions internally based on the same methodology. Climate Partner outlined our Corporate Carbon Footprint Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions.

Our product footprint goes a step further and estimates the electricity used to run Ecosia searches and services. Not all our providers share usage data specific to Ecosia's operations. For those we do not have concrete metrics, we base our estimate on their public sustainability reports, applied to our own data on search queries executed. This is our own estimate, based on our own methodology, and has not been independently audited yet.

Ecosia offers two AI features: AI Overviews and AI Chat. We use the Green Software Foundation's Green AI position paper as a reference. It calls for standardised measurement of AI's environmental impact in all stages of product development. Ecosia at this point does not train its own models but is adapting existing ones. We estimate the impact of our AI features per request using the EcoLogits methodology, which is based on Life Cycle Assessment, as defined in ISO 14044). It covers greenhouse gas emissions, raw material depletion, primary energy and water consumption for running the models, but not model training, networks or your device. We use this as estimates to inform our decision for further development of our AI services. 

Operational emissions are voluntarily compensated via donations to atmosfair, an external nonprofit organization, which invests into renewable certified off-set projects, 90 % certified by the CDM Gold Standard. More information about atmosfair and their projects can be found on their website. Ecosia is not additionally funding its own tree-planting project partners to compensate carbon-emissions which couldn't be avoided in the first place.

Sustainability indicators for website results on Ecosia Search

The leaf icon appears next to websites of companies that are listed by at least one of three external programs: GWÖ, B Corp or BNW. Ecosia doesn't certify or score anyone. The leaf points to a listing that someone else awarded or confirmed.

Ecosia chose these three programs. Companies can't pay to get the leaf. A leaf appears when a domain is listed by one of them:

Each uses its own methodology, GWÖ and B Corp assess practices directly, BNW confirms membership. The leaf means at least one recognizes the company by its own standards, not that all three agree or use equivalent criteria.

These three are a starting point, not a complete picture. Other certifications, like Blue Angel or ISO 14001, aren't yet covered, we're working on expanding the leaf feature over time.

Explaining your individual impact with Ecosia

Similar to other search engines, we generate revenue when our users click on the advertisements shown in our results. The amount we earn per ad click varies based on the specific search term, the user’s location, and other contributing factors. While we are not yet able to monetize all markets, we do see the entire Ecosia user community contributing to our mission. For that reason, we estimate individual impact metrics, regardless of where they are searching from. Ecosia doesn't own the planted trees, but holds the right to report the trees it financed as planted with Ecosia funding.

Ecosia profiles show an estimate of impact metrics for an average user at the level of that profile.  For trees funded by individual contribution, we calculate the average number of active days needed to reach that level, multiplying by average daily searches, average revenue per search and the share of revenue that goes to tree planting, then dividing by the average cost of planting a tree. The inputs are based on one full year of Ecosia usage and revenue data, last updated in August 2026. The same logic applies to hectares restored and energy generated. More information on Ecosia accounts can be found on our FAQs. 

Setting Ecosia as your default browser or search engine supports our mission because it increases the number of your searches that run through Ecosia rather than another provider. Ecosia doesn't earn money from searches themselves, we fund tree planting through the profit generated by ads shown alongside search results, so more searches through Ecosia means more ad-supported searches generating that profit.