The tumult has forced Ecosia to rethink its business plan in order to compete with new chatbot-like search engines built on large language models. Today, the company began switching from providing results exclusively from Microsoft’s Bing, as it has for the past 14 years, to primarily sourcing them from Google—though it will still syndicate some Bing results via marketing company System 1.
Being more actively involved in people’s online transactions could also provide an opportunity to nudge them into making more environmentally conscious decisions. Kroll says one place Ecosia could intervene to suggest greener choices is on searches for flights. “We could tell them what the cheapest flight is, but also that they could take the train instead and how much CO2 they could save,” he says. The era of generative search could offer new ways for a specialist search engine to stand out.