Ecosia is a search engine that talks up its green credentials. It repackages Microsoft Bing and puts its own ads on. All the money comes from those ads.

Ecosia’s big pitch is those ads pay for planting trees. That’s fine!

Unfortunately, Ecosia has something extra. It’s an AI. What?

Generative AI is a massive ecological disaster. The training and inference pump out carbon and suck up fresh water. The AI companies go to court to try to keep the numbers secret.

Ecosia insists, though, that theirs is a green AI! ‘Cos you can put the word “green” in front of any odious thing. This is called greenwashing.

Ecosia added an OpenAI chatbot in 2024. They called it “Green AI”, which actually meant they added a greenwashed initial prompt. In December, Ecosia put in a search AI also based on OpenAI. They currently run a Mistral model hosted in Europe.

Ecosia claims: [Ecosia]

we generate more renewable energy than our AI features use, from 100% clean sources like solar and wind.

Note what Ecosia is and is not saying there. Ecosia is not claiming the AI runs on clean power. If it did, they’d say that. But they don’t.

And generating clean power yourself obviously doesn’t make the emissions from the dirty power running your AI go away. It’s still pumping out CO₂.

You will not find actual numbers on Ecosia’s AI energy use. Ecosia could provide hard numbers on AI energy consumption — both inference and training. Those would be really useful numbers with an impact way beyond Ecosia. But Ecosia just doesn’t.

Ecosia brags how it does a monthly financial report. This is not any sort of normal, detailed financial report with columns of numbers and maybe a spreadsheet attachment. It’s some coloured blobs on a marketing page, with claimed bottom line numbers that do not show how they got to them. C’mon Ecosia, show us your spreadsheets. [Ecosia]

There’s an obvious way for Ecosia to instantly double the positive impact of its AI clean power programme! They could just not do the AI.

Do the users want this AI search? No. The users realise that nobody can claim to be “green” and do AI. They are fans of Ecosia’s green mission, and they are profoundly disappointed in Ecosia.

The users hate the AI. Ecosia knows the users hate the AI. But the executives have a bee in their bonnets. The CEO told t3n in January, “in three months we’ll be the biggest AI app in Europe.” I don’t think they’d made it there by April. [t3n, paywalled, in German]

But it’s OK! Just yesterday, Ecosia added a user opt-out. Not opt-in, but opt-out. They know very well that almost nobody changes defaults. And this way, they can blame you, the user, for not opting out. Now, you might call this greenwashing. [LinkedIn]

If you skip the AI, you won’t miss a lot. Ecosia’s AI gives even worse answers than Google or Bing’s AIs. Climate and energy writer Ketan Joshi — who covers AI at length — found Ecosia mixing him up with the travel writer Ketan Joshi. [blog post]

Here’s a Glassdoor report from an anonymous employee: [Glassdoor]

Listening to users was never this company’s strong point, but now users are screaming on every platform to get rid of anything AI, yet the company does not care at all.

Ecosia’s Glassdoor also tells you how Ecosia’s really into its union busting:

a group of people tried to form a Works Council due to the increasing numbers of burnout, mismanagement, and the usage of PIPs, and they were met with every union busting tactic in the book. First, they were bombarded with insults by colleagues, then a company lawyer showed up to the vote to disrupt it, the CEO recorded a video of hisself threatening to resign if a Works Council was formed, and lastly, most of the vocal Works Council supporters got fired or was given warnings.

Values-driven organisations, hey. I am told these claims about Ecosia suppressing the Works Council are accurate.

So — unspecified green claims without hard numbers, worker suppression, and putting in AI, of all things, and calling it “green.”

What other search engine should you use, then? Well, basically they’re all Google or Bing. Ecosia is Bing with greenwashing. I suggest you stop doing searches.

Anyone who wants to defend Ecosia, I’m keen to hear from you as and when you can give us checkable hard numbers. ’Cos Ecosia sure don’t.

• Video — Podcast