Chrome's Ad Blocker Is Here: How It Works

On Feb. 15, Chrome users will start saying goodbye to bad ads.

shutterstock 575551330 — *Credit: Jeramey Lende / Shutterstock*

In a blog post today (Feb. 14), Google spelled out the rules for its Better Ads Standards policy, which will block ads ruled as especially "intrusive." These include autoplaying video ads that include sound, large sticky ads that take over the lower-third of the screen, and ads that blanket the entire screen and require users sit through a countdown process.

In total, the Better Ads Standards will be used to filter out a total of 12 "particularly annoying" types of ads, which also include the ads that fill your screen as you scroll over them on a phone, flashing animated ads and mobile ads that take up more than 30 percent of your screen.

How It Works

But how will you know if ads are getting blocked? On the desktop, a notification will appear in the Chrome address bar, bearing a similarity to the message you recieve when Chrome blocks a pop-up window. Android users will instead see an "Ads blocked." message on the bottom of their screen, which can be tapped to access a toggle that enables the ads.

Google confirmed to Laptop Mag that the feature will not make it to iPhones, and only land on devices running "Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS." This is likely because Apple requires web browsers on iOS to use their own rendering engine.

Google is informing sites whose ads violate the rules, and made a tool available for site owners to check for compliance. If a site has failed to remove the non-compliant ads within 30 days of Google flagging it for being problematic, Chrome will begin blocking its ads.

To block the ads, the filters in Chrome will first check to see if a site is on the list of those violating the Better Ads standards. If that is the case, Chrome will then block the page from loading requests at the network-level, to prevent them from loading at all.

According to Google, this new tool is already having an impact on the web. The search and browsing giant claims that 42 percent of the sites that originally featured ads that would get filtered out have "resolved their issues and are now passing."