Due to the fact that studying the impact of environmental regulations on green technology innovation activities of enterprises is of vital significance for an improvement of China’s sustainable development capacity, based on micro data of A-share listed enterprises in Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan and Shanxi provinces from 2015 to 2019, taking as a quasi natural experiment the air quality ecological compensation policy implemented in Anhui Province in 2018, a difference-in-difference-in-difference model has thus been used to test the impact of air quality ecological compensation policy on corporate green technology innovation. It is found that firstly, the air quality ecological compensation policy significantly increases the proportion of green patent applications by listed companies in the air pollution industry in Anhui Province, but with a major effect on the application of green utility model patents. Secondly, in terms of the nature of the sample enterprises, the response intensity of state-owned enterprises to policies is more significant than that of non-state-owned enterprises. Thirdly, a robustness test is conducted on the results by changing the time of policy implementation, parallel trend hypothesis test and random matching of pseudo treatment groups, with the research conclusions remaining basically unchanged. Based on the above study, it is study that China should actively promote and improve the air quality ecological compensation policy, flexibly set the compensation standard and increase the incentive for substantive innovation behavior of enterprises, so as to give full play to the green technological innovation effect brought about by the compensation policy.