Tracking the Earth’s energy imbalance is one of the key methods for studying the contribution of human activities to climate change. Energy imbalance directly reflects the complex responses and feedback of the climate system and is an important indicator of climate change. However, accurately estimating the Earth’s energy budget has long been a challenge. Observations of the top of the atmosphere and surface radiative fluxes have high uncertainties, and it is difficult to validate different observation datasets. In addition, these high uncertainties lead to inaccurate estimates of changes in Earth’s energy budget fluxes. Furthermore, estimating surface radiative fluxes is challenging because of the lack of high-quality, high-resolution observational data. Recently, methods using ocean heat content/sea-level height data for the indirect estimation of the Earth’s energy budget have been widely applied. Considering that most of the energy imbalance flows into the ocean heat content, ocean data observations can yield estimates of the Earth’s energy imbalance with lower uncertainty. Additionally, reasonable estimates of the Earth’s energy budget can be obtained through multi-model ensemble methods using Earth system model outputs, supplemented with appropriate weighting strategies. By improving data integration capabilities and developing related technologies, climate scientists continuously enhance their understanding of the Earth’s energy budget, providing more precise scientific evidence for understanding and addressing increasingly severe global warming.