Ecosia and Qwant build European index

This partnership matters because it is Ecosia’s clearest path from being an AI summary layer on top of other companies’ search APIs to owning more of the raw search stack itself. The French engine is Qwant, and the two companies formed a 50 50 joint venture called European Search Perspective, or EUSP, to build a European index. In practice, that means Qwant contributes core indexing technology and French market strength, while Ecosia helps shape German coverage and gradually reduces dependence on Bing and Google.

• Building an index means running crawlers that fetch pages, deciding which pages to store, ranking them, and serving results fast enough for live search. That is expensive and operationally heavy, which is why Ecosia previously licensed search infrastructure instead of building it alone, even as a roughly 100 person company.
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• The likely collaborator is not a small vendor but a structural partner. In November 2024, Ecosia and Qwant announced EUSP, based in Paris, with plans to start serving French and German language results in 2025. By August 2025, Ecosia said its own European index was already serving a portion of French queries.
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• This also helps explain why search quality may be converging across API vendors. If smaller engines can share index infrastructure and keep the summarization layer modular, the hard moat shifts from model prompts to operating a reliable crawl, index, and ranking system across languages, markets, and privacy rules.
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The next step is a gradual unbundling of the search stack. Ecosia can keep using outside providers where they are strongest, while routing more standard web results and eventually more AI features through EUSP and related European infrastructure such as Staan. If that rollout works in France and Germany first, Ecosia gains lower dependency, better regional control, and a stronger base for multilingual AI search.