Block Google across every device you own
Not just the search page — the trackers, the fonts, the analytics and the phone-home traffic that Google puts on other people’s sites and inside your apps.
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
Search and YouTube are the obvious parts. The bigger half is everything you never chose: the analytics on a news site, the fonts a blog loads, the reCAPTCHA on a form, the advertising that follows you between them, and the steady background chatter from an Android phone.
There are matching lists for Apple and Microsoft, so you can cut one company out, or several, without disturbing anything else you have set up.
Decide how far you want to go
This one goes deep, and depth has consequences. With everything blocked you will notice “Sign in with Google” buttons stop working, embedded videos not playing, and the occasional form refusing to submit because its captcha never loads.
Most people run it one of two ways. Either on a single profile — a media box, a spare phone, the machine you browse on — while leaving the everyday device alone. Or everywhere, with a short list of exceptions added back. The next section is that list.
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.comAndroid 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.comGoogle 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.comYouTube
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.comGmail
Web and app access to an existing mailbox.
*.gmail.comRSS 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.comSetting 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.