Why Ecosia is our default search engine
We switched the default search engine on Circa's computers to Ecosia. Here is the reasoning, including the parts of the pitch we checked first.
Screenshot of ecosia.org, November 2026
We changed the default search engine on Circa’s computers to Ecosia. It is a small change, and exactly the kind of everyday decision our Sustainable Travel Guide spends 56 pages on. The settings nobody ever opens end up shaping a lot of small actions.
What convinced us
The ownership structure, more than the tree counter.
In 2018 Ecosia’s founders handed shares to the Purpose Foundation and gave up two specific rights: the right to sell the company, and the right to take profits out of it. That commitment is built into how the company is owned, so it survives a change of mood in the boardroom. Most corporate sustainability pledges have no such backstop.
Some other things we checked:
- Ecosia was founded in Berlin in 2009 and has been a certified B Corporation since 2014, the first German company to be certified.
- Around 80% of profits go into tree planting, and increasingly into climate technology, renewable energy and biodiversity projects. The counter on its home page passed 258 million trees in November 2026.
- It powers its servers with renewable energy and built its first solar plant in 2017.
- It publishes monthly financial reports: what came in, what went out, what was planted.
The reports are the part we care about most. When we looked at Iceland’s banks the test was the same. Does the organisation show you its workings, or only its slogans?
What it is not
Ecosia is not a privacy tool, and the green branding should not be allowed to suggest otherwise.
It does not build personal profiles from your search history and does not use external tracking tools. But to return results and ads, your query and IP address go to Microsoft Bing or Google. If strict privacy is your main concern, you want something else.
A single search also does not plant a tree. Searches earn ad revenue, and a share of the resulting profit pays for planting. That version is slower and less catchy than the slogan, which is roughly why we trust it more.
If you want to do the same
It takes about two minutes. Every major browser lets you change the default search engine in its settings, and Ecosia offers extensions and a mobile browser if you would rather not dig through menus.
A default is a cheap thing to change. It costs nothing and keeps working long after you have forgotten you changed it.