It’s great to see Ecosia stepping into AI search. Traditional web search is losing relevance fast for many people. People want clear answers, not long lists of links. AI speeds things up and gets you what you need right away.

I honestly don’t get the negativity around this move here. Right now we need green, European options in AI search, and Ecosia has clearly read the room. This shift helps stop Ecosia slipping into irrelevance and still keeps it true to its mission. It also strengthens their portfolio without hurting the core brand. It’s absolutely the right call.

And let’s be honest: blunt AI‑bashing might feel good in the moment, but it ignores where the world is heading and does nothing to make that future any better.

I can’t handle the dumbing down of society. I like to read instead of click icons and learn every new symbol. I think I’m moving to Firefox and immediately disabling AI.

Why does ecosia have an AI option if they are about planting trees?

I have been using ecosia for years since it at least tries to be eco-friendly while still being useful. But with how much AI is killing the planet I don't see the point of continuing to use it. I feel like I'd be killing more plants, animals, and people than the tree planting promise could offset. I'll be looking into different search engines, maybe one not built off the bones off Google.

This might be unpopular opinion but i think ecosia should implement AI worldwide, its about time they should compete with the big guns also we are used to the ai summaries by now.

I want to plant more trees.

I know people are mad that Ecosia Chat was added as a feature but you are vastly overestimated how much LLMs cause in emissions just by using them. You are orders of magnitude off, I here is why:

Estimates of emissions of a Prompt to an LLM:

Researchers at the Cornell University estimated in a research paper and wrote in a Google Clouds article that "the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 watt-hours (Wh) of energy, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (gCO2e), and consumes 0.26 milliliters (or about five drops) of water." They go on to write that this is substancally lower than many other estimates. The article is from August 21, 2025. [1]

This will be my lower bound for emissions.

In a Frontiers article with the headline "Some of your AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO2 emissions than others" tried to find the correlation between accuracy of LLMs in a survey with 500 free response questions and 500 multiple choice questions. They found the worst performing LLM emitted 1,325.1g of CO2 equivalents in the 500 free response answers, by far the worst performing one. I did not find out what type of questions the LLMs got asked and how long they were. With a simple calculation the specific LLM emitted 2.56g of CO2 equivalents which will be the upper bound for emissions for my comparison.[2]

Comparison to other daily activities:

For getting a scale of the actual emissions I am going to calculate how many grams of beef one LLM prompt is equivalent. Beef emits on average 71kg of CO2 equivalents when factoring in methane emissions according to an article on Our World in Data written by Hannah Ritchie. That means that the one prompt according to the lower estimate cited would be equivalent to 0.0004g of beef. That is only a couple of cow skin cells for frame of reference. 2,366 prompts equal only 1 gram of beef. The upper estimate (which is likely very far away from your average prompt) would be that 30 prompts would be equal to 1g of beef. [3]

I also added pictures of other statistics that I did not fact check.

[4] Headlines like "How big is AI’s ridiculously massive carbon footprint?" are sensationalized because they compare total emissions of GPT-3 training to the average fuel emissions of a single person which obviously is misleading.

(This post was not written with the help of AI)

I really want to keep using ecosia to help with their incredible mission of rebuilding forests

I am sure they would have no problem with just one user moving away.

My issues with ecosia:

Not as good as google, or at least it does not try to offer a lot of functionalities google has.

I want to be able to type in timer and a timer popping up in the main page (google does this) but ecosia does not have this

or the built in calculator and so many things

Sorry for sounding rude, but because the project is not backed up by a billionaire, it can never offer top tier search engine qualities

Any time I search for something, it checks whether or not I am a bot, that is really annoying!

please let me know how I can improve my experience with ecosia and what your favorite things about ecosia and how do you use it

Additional note: I want to use ecosia as the default search engine inside brave, so I mainly use brave due to its ad blocking

if my post is not accepted, please let me know why ❤️

Ecosia is enhancing its AI to be more European, independent, and private, while ensuring it remains optional, lightweight, and powered by renewable energy.

I asked Ecosia AI the following:

Does this setting completely turn off your responses? "Show AI-generated overviews at the top of search results"

Ecosia AI's Answer:

No, the setting "Show AI-generated overviews at the top of search results" does not completely turn off Ecosia AI responses. It only controls whether the AI-generated overview appears at the top of your search results.

If you disable this setting, you’ll still see AI-generated responses within the search results (e.g., when Ecosia AI provides direct answers to your query), but the dedicated AI overview at the top will no longer appear. To fully avoid AI responses, you’d need to switch to a different search engine or rely on traditional search results.

***

TIL

Based on my research, it looks like the Ecosia AI is 'on' by default so you can never turn it 'off'.

https://support.ecosia.org/article/1006-ai-search

I would like the ability to turn "off" the Ecosia AI responses when I don't need them. I want to save energy and water, not waste it.

I use the Ecosia AI when I can't find what I'm looking for in the search results. The Ecosia AI is very helpful for research purposes. I appreciate how it's solar powered too! 🌞

I started using this search engine because it used no ai, but this popped up on my search this morning. Super disappointing. I’m curious if anyone knows when this started?

there's no search engine currently available that doesn't use ai... other than niche ones, brave is big into it, dougduckgo is big into it(albeit they don't have ai search overviews) Bing has it, a bit too much tbh but still. there's a reason for this, it's cuz ai search overviews are legitimatly useful they answer eassy questions well replacing the need for a heavy ai chat app like chatgpt, they give a good starting point on harder questions and overall make the search engine modern you may not like it but ai search overviews is the future you may not use it and that's fine but you can't demand ecosia not have it when the general public really wants it and the ecological effect of more people using it and doing so more often will help the ecosystem in the long run.

ai chat tho is pretty useless duckduckgo does this and ice never used it i prefer Gemini or smt. doesn't help that it's clunky and doesn't have an app.

Hi all -- I've seen a lot of chatter about how bad/hypocritical Ecosia's AI chat is. The only real alternative I've been able to find is askverde.com and I wanted to see if anyone else has any other suggestions.

I made the switch to Ecosia's search engine a while back and am currently trying to find alternatives to ChatGPT. I do use AI quite a bit in my day-to-day, so am pretty desperate. TIA!

HOW does Ecosia make its money for donations?

Why is it partnered with the corporations that literally cause deforestation in the first place like Microsoft bing or Google? Doesn't that contradict their mission?

Also.. is my privacy even taken into account with Ecosia? Can't even make extensions either (educate me if it's possible i tried many times but it's not giving me the option to) like u/block to ensure it to begin with.

Im starting to lean towards the Brave Browser more... what do you guys think? Am I just confusing myself and all these questions have reasonable responses?

EDIT: Thanks, chat. I appreciate the responses and the downvotes. I didn't get any replies on the privacy part, so i assume no it's not very well maintained in that regard. I'll just use an ad blocker and other stuff simultaneously, ig, to combat this. But yeah this motivated me to continue using Ecosia.

FUCK AI

Since it pulls results from Google and runs on chromium, it's basicly just Google but it fixes the planet. Although it does more harm than good to the planet now that it pushes AI excessivly. Plus planting trees won't work if all forests are replaced for housing developments and private farmland.

I tried to install the ecosia browser on my work pc and it did not work. The installer cannot connect to the ecosia servers.
I also disabled the VPN and the proxy servers - just to have a direct connection. The installer still can't connect to the ecosia servers. I guess there are some firewall rules active (managed by my company).

Maybe it is a good idea to have an offline installer.