The Offset Foundation is a leader in the carbon credit space, helping online businesses take measurable action against climate change. Since 2022, they’ve provided tools to track, calculate, and offset emissions– including a proprietary carbon calculator (now available at offset.org) and access to high-integrity, certified carbon credits.
Their real-time assessment tool empowers companies to immediately understand and reduce their environmental impact with precision and transparency. Most companies can accurately and automatically calculate their digital emissions, for free, within 60 seconds. This is an unprecedented result and stands out in a landscape of static calculators and manual analysis.
Challenge: Build a Transparent & Scalable Web Carbon Calculator
The carbon-offsetting industry began with a simple idea: if companies couldn’t cut all their emissions, they could fund projects—like reforestation or renewable energy—that reduce pollution elsewhere.
Over time, however, the industry grew inconsistent. With varying standards and little transparency, some businesses claimed "carbon neutrality" without offering solid, verifiable data.
This created a credibility crisis and led to allegations of greenwashing—an industry term for making unfounded claims related to environmental impact. Skepticism grew, and so did confusion about what carbon offsetting actually meant.
Was it science-backed or just a branding move? Were businesses truly reducing emissions, or just purchasing peace of mind?
The Offset Foundation recognized this growing credibility problem and set out to solve it. They saw a clear need for a better approach: one that was accurate, automated, and grounded in real data.
Paul Reynolds, Offset Foundation COO, put it simply:
“No one had developed a proprietary calculator that achieved these results in our space before. It was uncharted territory.”
The Offset team recognized the industry had potential. They saw confusion surrounding emissions and the definitions of carbon offsetting, as well as businesses claiming things that weren’t true.
“What does it even mean?” Reynolds says, referencing the term carbon neutral. “There’s a term in our industry called greenwashing, where people make it seem as if they’re more efficient than they are. It’s been a real problem.”
The team also realized that companies were interested in improving and that someone with verifiable, data-backed solutions could significantly change the industry.
Alexander Martin-Bale, Offset Foundation’s CTO “You’ll notice that most companies are intrigued by mitigating their climate impact in whatever ways they can. If you give them a way to easily achieve that - especially at a small level of investment, as a starting point - you’re going to have their ear.”
Thus, the problem was clear: businesses needed a way to reduce their carbon footprint without spending hours on manual calculations or relying on guesswork.
Offset Foundation took on the challenge.
The goal: to build a transparent, automated tool that offered real-time, measurable insights instead of rough estimates.
It had to track emissions dynamically, factoring in:
- Website traffic
- User engagement
- Hosting infrastructure
- Data transfer
- Device usage
- Regional variations
- And more
And it had to be simple— frictionless for any business to adopt. But one hurdle remained. They needed access to reliable web traffic and user engagement data.
This is where the Semrush Trends API came into the picture. The Trends API delivers the missing layer of data Offset needed to power its solution at scale.
Solution: Semrush Trends API as a Key Data Source
Building a reliable emissions calculator isn’t easy. What the Offset Foundation needed was a way to quickly calculate large-scale data in a package that was accurate and easy to read.
Alexander Martin-Bale, Offset Foundation’s CTO “We needed a very high-level view. We needed to see a website’s traffic in terms of visits, page views, and mobile vs. desktop percentage per country. So when we’re doing carbon analysis on a website, we can get the full breakdown. Semrush Trends API was the solution.”
It’s a complicated task.
“Just think of all the details we have to figure out,” Alexander explains. “We need to do a full page load, looking at components in the website, including scripts, images, everything. We have to add it all. We need to see what can be cached and what can’t, where a website is hosted, whether or not you’re on the public cloud.”
What Offset Foundation learned is that the above was possible after integrating Semrush Trends API into their process.
The Semrush Trends API gave the Offset team:
- A high-level view of different website traffic, especially in terms of visit duration, page views, and detailed mobile vs. desktop breakdowns.
- Visitor distribution numbers by country, factoring in grid intensity and regional energy efficiency – allowing for carbon calculations with up to 95% accuracy.
- Dynamic data without requiring any manual processes, ensuring both privacy and efficiency for clients.
Leveraging Semrush's third-party analytics, Offset Foundation satisfied a major market need. By giving companies an easier and faster-to-use process than sharing Google Analytics or installing tracking scripts, Offset made the process not only more seamless for businesses but easy-to-understand, and above all, transparent.
Results: A Data-driven Path to Reducing Digital Carbon
The Offset team realized there wasn’t just a lack of an easy-to-use digital carbon footprint calculator, but that businesses genuinely wanted to track and reduce their digital carbon footprint.
By using Semrush Trends API, their idea became a reality. Now, businesses can easily measure their digital carbon emissions and access the data they need to operate more efficiently and responsibly.
What’s more, Offset pairs these insights with high-integrity, certified carbon credits, ensuring that any offsetting actions taken are credible, transparent, and verifiable.
Key Takeaways: Semrush Trends API Enables Innovation
As Paul, Alex, and the Offset Foundation team have shown, market intelligence and competitive analysis tools can be used in unconventional ways. With easy-to-use access to reliable data, businesses can make informed, data-driven choices. This is in addition to eliminating the need for antiquated, manual processes and offering a privacy-compliant anonymized method of providing traffic data, which is required to accurately calculate emissions.
But what Offset Foundation also discovered is that competitive traffic and user behavior data is about more than just marketing strategies.
By optimizing workflows—like the Offset team has done—the Semrush Trends API helps businesses stay focused on what matters most: their customers and goals.
With fewer manual processes and more efficient operations, companies are better equipped to advance their mission and contribute to a more sustainable world.
Here’s what they accomplished:
- An Industry-First Web Carbon Calculator: Offset Foundation used Semrush Trends API to successfully build their proprietary tool, allowing real-time, verifiable carbon footprint assessment for websites—a feature unprecedented in the carbon credit industry.
- Scalability & Automation: The integration of Semrush Trends API allowed Offset to automate carbon footprint calculations for over 500 enterprise clients, significantly reducing the manual workload for businesses.
- More Transparency: Offset used the Semrush Trends API to bring much-needed transparency to the industry. Businesses now rely on clear, third-party data for emissions calculations—eliminating greenwashing concerns and avoiding the need for annual reprocessing as data updates automatically.
- Market Adoption & Future Growth: Initially a value-added service, the Offset web carbon calculator quickly gained traction and is now a core business segment—driving a 30% increase in enterprise adoption over the past year.
What’s Ahead
Offset Foundation’s vision extends well beyond website emissions. The company has now expanded into tracking emissions for mobile apps, social media channels, and email campaigns, as the demand for privacy-compliant data sources like Semrush Trends API continues to grow. They are currently on track to offset +100,000 metric tons of digital CO2 emissions by the end of next year, further proving the impact of data-driven sustainability solutions.
With Semrush’s data infrastructure, Offset will expand digital impact assessments and explore new collaborations—like showing CO₂ metrics directly in-platform—to enhance transparency and help businesses reduce emissions through real, data-driven insights.