What does blocking trackers actually buy you?
Here's the data.
An independent benchmark tested 119 top U.S. news sites under three conditions — no blocking, DNS-level blocking, and browser-extension blocking — and measured exactly what changed.
119 real sites, three conditions, one automated harness.
The benchmark used a Puppeteer-driven testing harness running in Docker to load each site in a fresh browser instance and record load time, DOMContentLoaded time, total bytes transferred, request counts, third-party request counts, and unique hostnames contacted. Every site was tested three times, once per condition:
- Baseline — no blocking of any kind, default browser.
- DNS-level blocking — AdGuard DNS, the same filtering layer Bloqr automates.
- Extension blocking — AdGuard's browser extension, filtering inside the page.
The site list was drawn from NewzDash's top U.S. news publisher rankings, combined with FeedSpot's top news sites. The results below reflect the 119-site run captured in March 2025.
Averages across all 119 sites.
DNS-level blocking — with nothing installed on the device — recovers most of the gain a browser extension gets, simply by refusing to resolve tracker and ad domains before a connection is ever attempted.
| Metric | Baseline | DNS blocking | Δ vs. baseline | Extension blocking | Δ vs. baseline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Page load time | 11,271 ms | 7,356 ms | -35% | 6,190 ms | -45% |
| DOMContentLoaded | 3,909 ms | 3,216 ms | -18% | 3,148 ms | -19% |
| Page weight | 6.07 MB | 4.32 MB | -29% | 3.72 MB | -39% |
| Total requests | 299.2 | 177.8 | -41% | 144.9 | -52% |
| Third-party requests | 220.3 | 101.9 | -54% | 68.6 | -69% |
| Unique hostnames hit | 74.4 | 20.5 | -73% | 11.3 | -85% |
The same handful of companies, over and over.
In the unblocked baseline run, these companies showed up most often across the 119-site sample — the adtech and analytics stack that DNS-level filtering removes before a single request goes out:
- Google115/119 sites
- The Rubicon Project (Magnite)82/119 sites
- comScore81/119 sites
- Amazon79/119 sites
- Microsoft78/119 sites
- PubMatic77/119 sites
- Criteo76/119 sites
- Index Exchange74/119 sites
This isn't Bloqr's research. We're citing it because it's good.
This benchmark was designed and run independently by Maxim Topciu as the open-source project research-ad-blocking-web-performance, released under the MIT license. Bloqr had no role in designing the methodology or collecting the data — we're presenting the results here because they're a clean, reproducible illustration of what DNS-level filtering (the mechanism Bloqr automates) actually does to page performance.
Get the DNS-level win, automatically.
Bloqr keeps the filter lists behind DNS-level blocking current across every DNS provider you use — no extension, no client software, no manual syncing.