De-Google

Block Google across every device you own

A curated list of thousands of Alphabet domains, applied at the DNS layer so it covers apps and background services rather than just the browser.

Why a browser extension is not enough

Blocking Google in a browser stops the pages you visit. It does not stop an Android phone checking in, a smart speaker reporting back, a television resolving an advertising domain, or any of the analytics and font and tag endpoints embedded in other people’s websites. Those requests are made by the operating system and by apps, not by a tab.

DNS filtering happens before any of it. Every device has to resolve a domain before it can reach it, so a rule set once applies to everything on that device — including software with no settings of its own.

What the De-Google list covers

Thousands of domains spanning search, advertising and analytics, YouTube, Android services, Fonts, reCAPTCHA, Firebase, DoubleClick, Google Cloud endpoints used for telemetry, and the country-specific search domains that are otherwise easy to miss.

It sits alongside De-Apple and De-Microsoft, so a device can be cut off from one vendor, or from several, without touching anything else you have blocked.

Decide how far you want to go

De-Google is deliberately thorough, and thorough has consequences. Blocking Alphabet outright will break sign-in with Google on third-party sites, embedded YouTube video, reCAPTCHA challenges on forms, Google Fonts on sites that load them, and Play Store functions on an Android device.

Two ways to live with that. Apply it to one profile — a media device, a spare phone, a browser machine — and leave your everyday device alone. Or apply it broadly and use custom rules to allow back the handful of domains you actually need, which is how most people end up running it.

If what you want is the tracking rather than the whole company, the filtering categories block Google’s advertising and analytics domains while leaving its products working.

What to allow back, and what it restores

These are the exceptions people reach for most often. Add them as allow rules on the profile running De-Google — the list is a starting point rather than a complete set, and the right answer is whichever of these you actually use.

The distinction worth holding on to is between services you choose to use and services that run behind your back. Allowing YouTube means YouTube knows you watched something, which you knew when you pressed play. It does not put Google Fonts, Tag Manager, DoubleClick or Analytics back on every unrelated site you visit — those stay blocked, and they are the reason to run this at all.

Push notifications on Android

The single most disruptive thing to lose, and the least obvious. Every Android app that notifies you goes through this one host — messaging, banking, deliveries, alarms. Blocked, they simply stop arriving, with nothing to indicate why.

mtalk.google.com*mtalk.google.com

Android reporting the network as working

Android decides whether a network has internet by fetching this. Blocked, the phone shows "no internet" and may refuse to stay on Wi-Fi at all, even though everything else is fine.

connectivitycheck.gstatic.com

Google Search — and reCAPTCHA with it

Allowing the search host also restores the reCAPTCHA challenges that sit on other people’s sign-up and contact forms, because they are served from the same place. That is usually the reason a form silently refuses to submit.

www.google.com

YouTube

The page, the video streams and the thumbnails are all on separate hosts, so allowing only the first gets you a player that never starts.

www.youtube.comm.youtube.comyoutu.be*.googlevideo.com*.ytimg.com

Gmail

Web and app access to an existing mailbox.

*.gmail.com

RSS feeds published through FeedBurner

A long tail of blogs and podcasts still serve their feed this way, and a reader will look broken rather than blocked.

feeds.feedburner.comfeedproxy.google.com

Setting it up

Enable the De-Google category on a profile, then point a device at that profile’s resolver address. Nothing is installed, and the change applies to the device immediately.

The per-platform steps are on the setup page. If you want the whole household covered, set it on the router; if you want it to follow a device off the network, set it on the device itself.

See pricing