Block ads and trackers on every device on your wifi, with AdGuard Home
How to block ads and trackers on every device on your wifi with AdGuard Home. No per-device app needed. Setup steps, DNS tips, and honest limits.
AdGuard Home is a DNS server you run yourself. Point your router at it and every device on your network — phones, TVs, laptops, smart-home gadgets — gets ads and tracker domains blocked before they load, with no per-device app or browser extension required.
This is the same idea as a paid filtered-DNS subscription (NextDNS Pro and similar), except the filtering rules run on hardware in your house instead of a third party's servers seeing every DNS lookup your household makes.
How it works
STEP 1 — Install AdGuard Home on your box
A small, low-resource service — it runs comfortably alongside everything else on the same NAS.
STEP 2 — Point your router's DNS at it
One setting, changed once, in your router's admin page. Every device on the network is covered automatically after that.
STEP 3 — Pick your blocklists
Sensible defaults out of the box; add more later for specific trackers or categories if you want to be stricter.
STEP 4 — Check the dashboard
A live view of what got blocked and where it came from — the same visibility a paid DNS product charges for.
What we actually configure
Your router's DHCP server disabled or pointed at the box first — running two DHCP servers at once is the single most common cause of "the wifi got flaky" complaints from people who tried this themselves.
A secondary DNS fallback, so a reboot of the box does not take the whole household offline for a minute while it restarts.
Blocklists tuned to your household, not the default list left on autopilot forever.
Query log retention set deliberately — long enough to debug a wrongly-blocked site, not so long it becomes a permanent household browsing history.
Honest limitations
Only covers devices using your home wifi's DNS by default — a phone on cellular data or someone else's wifi is not filtered unless you set up remote access back to it.
A handful of apps hardcode their own DNS (some smart TVs, some ad-heavy apps) and can bypass network-level filtering entirely — no DNS-level blocker fixes that.
If the box is down, DNS falls back to your router's normal settings — filtering pauses, the internet does not.
What this replaces: Replaces a paid filtered-DNS subscription like NextDNS Pro ($1.99/mo) — prices checked on the subscription calculator.