Questions, answered plainly.

Not in a way you'll notice. DNS lookups are tiny, and our servers are in London. Pages that would have loaded lots of ads often load faster, because there's less to fetch. Your download speeds aren't touched, because your traffic doesn't pass through us, only the lookups do.

On Android, yes: Private DNS works on Wi-Fi and mobile data. Setting your router only covers devices on your home Wi-Fi. Away from home, your phone uses Private DNS if you've set it up. On iPhone and iPad we're working on a profile that does the same.

Yes. Switch Private DNS back to Automatic on your phone, or set your router's DNS back to automatic. Switch it back on whenever you like. The setup guides show how to undo each step.

It happens occasionally: a blocklist catches something a site needs. Add the site to your allow-list in the app, and it'll load normally again. If you're not sure which name to allow, email us and we'll help.

We run two servers in London, and they share the load. Your settings are kept on both, so it doesn't matter which one answers. If one is down, your devices use the other.

We can see the names your devices look up, because that's what DNS is. We keep those logs for 24 hours and then delete them. We don't see the pages you read or what you do on a site, and we don't sell or share the logs. We use them to run the service and to make your weekly report. We may also look at the source addresses of those lookups to check the setting isn't being used in more places at once than you've registered. See the privacy policy.

Most DNS filters pass your lookups on to a big public resolver, such as Google or Cloudflare. We don't. Each of our London servers runs Unbound, which looks names up itself, starting from the internet's root servers. The site's DNS servers see our address, not yours, and Unbound checks DNSSEC so it can tell if an answer has been tampered with. Quad9 and Cloudflare are only used as a backup if our own resolver is down. How it works has a fuller account.

No. You get one unique DNS setting, tied to the Google account you buy with, and it's for your own use. You can register it twice, for example on your phone and your home router. If it's used in more places at once than you've registered, we'll email you first, at the address on your account, to let you know. We won't suspend the account as a first step.

Setting up your home router is part of setup. You can register your unique DNS setting on the router as well as on your phone, and once the router is set up, everyone else at home is covered on your Wi-Fi: TVs, consoles, laptops and other phones. Away from home, your own phone is covered if you've set up Android's Private DNS.

No. Some ads can't be blocked at DNS level, such as YouTube's in-video ads, or ads served from the same address as the content. How it works explains the limits.