What Lilo actually does
Lilo is a French search engine founded in Paris in 2014 by engineers Clément Le Bras and Marc Haussaire, operating as Lilo SAS out of the 13th arrondissement. It launched publicly in 2015 with a specific mission: turn ordinary web searching into a funding stream for social and environmental causes that users themselves choose, rather than routing ad revenue solely into the company's own pocket.
The core product
Functionally, Lilo works like most metasearch products — it licenses search results and ad inventory from partners including Bing, Google, Yahoo and the French local-directory service Pages Jaunes rather than building its own crawler and index, so the underlying result quality reflects those upstream sources. What's distinct is what happens with the money. Every search a user performs earns one digital "drop" of water. Drops accumulate and the user allocates them, at their own pace, to one or more projects from Lilo's public directory — spanning social aid (supporting hospitals like Necker-Enfants Malades or CHU de Lille), environmental protection, and animal welfare. Lilo states it redistributes 80% of the advertising profit generated by its users to those chosen projects, with the value of each drop calculated proportionally to actual revenue and drops donated. Crucially, this model runs without harvesting or selling users' personal search data — the company has been explicit that the funding comes from advertising placements, not from a data-broker business behind the scenes.
What's new or notable
Lilo's growth started small: the company crowdfunded its launch on Ulule in 2015, raising just €5,000 in seed money before scaling entirely on advertising revenue from that point on. Redistributed funds crossed €50,000 by April 2016, €100,000 by September 2016, and the first €1 million milestone in 2018. Lilo has kept a low profile compared to bigger alternative search engines, but its cumulative donation total has grown steadily since — reported revenue moved from €1.74 million in 2018 to €2.58 million in 2019, a roughly 48% year-on-year increase, then passed €4 million by November 2021 and €5 million by 2023. The company continues to add new supported projects and partner charities to its selectable list, and offers a business-facing variant so companies can direct their own Lilo-driven search traffic toward causes they choose, extending the same mechanic beyond individual users.
Who should use Lilo
Great fit if…
- You want your ordinary searching to matter — no behavior change is required beyond switching the default search engine; the donation happens passively.
- You care which specific cause your activity supports — Lilo lets you choose the project yourself rather than a corporate CSR pick.
- You're comfortable with Bing-licensed results — the search quality is solid for general queries, on par with other Bing-powered engines.
- You like watching a running total — Lilo's own published donation figures let you see the model actually working at scale, not just as a marketing claim.
Skip it if…
- You need an independently-indexed search engine — Lilo doesn't crawl its own index, so it inherits its partners' blind spots.
- You run aggressive ad blocking everywhere — since the donation pool comes directly from ad revenue, blocking Lilo's own ads undercuts the model you're supporting.
Pricing in detail
Lilo is entirely free to use for individual searchers, with no subscription, account paywall or premium search tier. The business variant for companies is a separate commercial offering outside the consumer product this fiche covers, letting an organization direct the search traffic generated by its own staff or website visitors toward causes it selects, on top of the same underlying search and advertising infrastructure used by individual users.
| Plan | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Lilo (individual) | Free — €0 | Unlimited search, drop accumulation, project selection and donation tracking, Android/iOS apps, browser extension |
Where it falls short
- Not an independent search index — result relevance is bounded by the quality of licensed partner engines, chiefly Bing.
- Donation size fluctuates with ad revenue — the amount funneled to any given project depends on how much advertising Lilo actually sells, not a fixed guarantee.
Privacy & data
Lilo states its revenue model relies on advertising placements rather than selling personal search data, and it does not require an account to search, only to track accumulated drops toward a chosen project. It is registered and operates under French law from Paris.
How we checked this
Verified against lilo.org's English site, the French Wikipedia entry on Lilo (entreprise) for founding, legal form and revenue figures, and pappers.fr's public company registry extract for Lilo SAS, all checked 2026-09-05.
What you get, what you give up
What you get
- 80% of advertising profit goes to social/environmental projects the user personally selects, not a fixed corporate charity list
- Over €5 million donated cumulatively since 2015 with a public, browsable project directory showing where funds went
What you give up
- Search results are licensed from Bing/Google-adjacent partners rather than a proprietary index, so result quality tracks those upstream engines, not an independent ranking
- The donation model depends entirely on ad revenue, so heavier ad-blocker usage among Lilo's own users directly shrinks the pool being redistributed