Companies Are Blocking Ads Through Browsers At Scale

A recent report suggests the prevalence of ad blocking in enterprise environments has grown significantly in the last few years. Estimates suggest that up to 50% of total ad blocked traffic worldwide could originate from enterprise-controlled environments.

One driver of this trend is the shift of critical business workflows into the browser. With SaaS now powering everything from CRMs to design and productivity tools, the browser has become the primary workspace — and, therefore, a frontline security layer. Ad blocking now forms part of the defence against emerging cyber threats.

For many outside of IT and cybersecurity, the scale and sophistication of these deployments remain poorly understood.

When people think of enterprise-level ad blocking, they often imagine it happening only at the network level — via firewalls or DNS filtering. In other words, when you connect your laptop or mobile phone to your office Internet, ads automatically disappear.

But that’s just part of the story.

A significant share now occurs at the device-level, particularly through the browser.

Today, we’ll focus on that often-overlooked dimension: browser-based ad blocking in enterprise environments.

What Do We Mean by “Enterprise”?

When we say “enterprise” ad blocking, many people picture Fortune 500 corporations with sprawling IT teams and thousands of endpoints (i.e. users). But in reality, the term covers a much broader spectrum:

• Large corporations with global operations

• Mid-sized companies with hundreds or thousands of employees

• Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), even a 10-person company with a managed IT service

• Educational institutions, such as schools and universities

• Government agencies and public-sector departments, from national to local level

If an organisation has centrally managed IT policies it qualifies as “enterprise” in this context. When you combine every organisation applying these measures, the impact is enormous.

The Limitations of Network-Level Blocking

Traditionally, enterprises relied on network-level solutions — firewalls or DNS filters — to block ads and malicious content. These methods filter traffic before it ever reaches the user’s device.

While effective for certain security threats, they are blunt instruments when it comes to controlling the user experience in the browser. They can’t access the page structure, so they tend to break legitimate functionality. If that happens, there’s nothing the end user can do to unblock it — except complain to their IT manager.

Employee: “Dave… our company website isn’t loading properly!”

Dave (IT Manager): “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

For example, network-level blocking can’t easily accommodate edge cases — like when a role requires viewing ads (e.g. for a VP of Marketing), or when a site depends on scripts often caught in blocklists (e.g. a CRM). That inflexibility kills productivity and creates frustration for both end users and IT.

Further, network solutions only work when devices are connected to the corporate network. Once a laptop switches to home Wi-Fi or a phone to cellular, those protections disappear. This is a critical security gap in a world of remote and hybrid work.

The Strengths Of Browser-Based Blocking

Browser-based ad blockers eliminate this dependency on location. They run at the device level, inside the browser itself, which means protection follows the user wherever they go — whether they’re on office Wi-Fi, at home, or working from a coffee shop.

By integrating directly with the page-rendering process, browser blockers offer capabilities that network-level filters can’t match:

• More Accurate: They can apply much more nuanced rules — hiding ads but keeping important business functionality like live chat, analytics, and the CRM in tact.

• Deeper Visibility: They can block ads and trackers that are served from the same domain as core content. This is a common tactic that bypasses DNS or firewall-based systems.

• Visual Control: They can hide or remove on-page elements like cookie banners, ad placeholders, and pop-up overlays, creating a cleaner experience.

• Granular Whitelisting: IT teams can allowlist URLs or elements when there’s a false positive (something’s been blocked that shouldn’t have). This happens more often than you think! Users can also be granted this control locally within their browser.

• Role-Based Policies: Different personnel can be given different ad blocking settings. Finance can run on maximum blocking, while marketing can operate with more lenient settings to keep ad tools functional.

• Reduced Overhead for IT: Easier to troubleshoot. Users can self-report, and IT can push fixes remotely without touching network infrastructure.

For these reasons, browser-based ad blocking has become a popular choice for the enterprise. And as more work moves into the browser — replacing traditional desktop software — it’s no longer just a convenience. It’s becoming critical business infrastructure.

Some even call the browser “the last mile” of the enterprise security stack. Keeping it secure is business-critical. Removing ads is quickly becoming a best practice to achieve just that.

Why, though?

Ads aren’t just a distraction; they’re an attack vector. They’ve been linked to malware infections, phishing attempts disguised as ads, and even cryptojacking scripts that hijack employee machines.

In many cases, these threats come from legitimate sites unknowingly serving compromised ads via third-party ad providers. In other cases, it comes through their own ad infrastructure. This is the case with Google Ads.

Browser-based ad blockers do have limitations, though. By design, they only stop ads inside the browser — leaving users exposed to ads (and their risks) in other apps. This is where complementary solutions, like network-level or VPN-based blocking, have a role to play.

How Browser-Based Ad Blocking Happens

So, how are IT departments installing and managing ad blocking software in browsers? After all, physically going around installing an ad blocker on each device sounds like an admin nightmare.

Well, it has been a pretty janky process up until fairly recently. Deploying and managing browser extensions at scale required specialist expertise and manual effort.

However, browsers today have made this dead easy. “Enterprise browsers” are now a thing. These are browsers designed (or packaged) specifically for business environments, offering features that meet enterprise needs — security controls, policy enforcement, and governance.

IT managers can manage everything remotely from a centralised cloud dashboard built for this exact purpose. No more hacking together workarounds or repurposing tools for a job they weren’t designed to do. Any changes made flow automatically to every managed browser across the organisation.

Meaning: IT can force-install an ad blocker across thousands of endpoints with just a few clicks — no end user action required. They can also lock the extension in a managed state, preventing users from changing its settings or removing it. On top of that, IT teams can enforce policies, create exceptions for specific departments, and push updates instantly.

In short: the IT department now has the “one ad blocker ring” to rule them all.

The Enterprise Ad Blocking Landscape

So, who are the players bringing ad blocking to enterprise browsers?

There are two main categories:

• Mainstream browsers with enterprise controls – familiar names like Chrome and Edge offer centralised management tools for ad block extension deployment.

• Enterprise browsers – purpose-built for business, where ad blocking is part of a broader security and governance strategy. Island is a strong contender emerging in this new category.

Let’s take a little close look at each.

Chrome & Edge — Mainstream Browsers For The Enterprise

Chrome and Edge dominate enterprise environments by pairing familiarity with infrastructure compatibility. Organisations already using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 can leverage these browsers’ admin consoles — Chrome Browser Cloud Management and Microsoft Edge for Business — to force-install ad blocking extensions.

For Google and Microsoft, their browsers act like a strategic moat. By positioning them as secure, compliant, and easy to manage, they keep enterprises locked into their ecosystems. When companies standardise Chrome Enterprise across thousands of employees, the browser becomes part of the IT backbone and user workflows.

Island — Dedicated “Enterprise Browser”

Island represents a different play: don’t retrofit a consumer browser — build one for enterprise from the ground up. Its ad blocking capability is native, integrated at the core rather than bolted on through an extension.

This allows for policy enforcement without relying on third-party developers and gives IT granular control while preserving flexibility for end users. Features like a simple toggle in the browser menu to turn off ad blocking for a specific page, combined with IT’s ability to set policy-based exceptions for certain sites, solve a major enterprise challenge: keeping security in place without breaking business-critical workflows.

Since launching in 2022, Island has grown rapidly, demonstrating strong enterprise appetite for browser-level security baked in at the architecture level. That demand comes at a cost: Island commands a premium price point, but enterprises appear willing to pay for what mainstream browsers can’t fully deliver.

Adblock Analyst View

As more IT teams learn about enterprise ad blocking — and as browsers make it simpler to deploy in enterprise environments — ad blocking is on its way to becoming a standard security practice, as routine as rolling out any other core business app.

For IT, the calculation is simple: minimal cost (often included in enterprise packages), no legal risk, and huge upside in reducing the chance of an attack that could cost millions.

But this shift isn’t without friction. For Google, it creates tension: enterprise ad blocking strengthens Chrome’s position in IT strategy, but it undermines Google’s core business model — serving ads. That may explain why Google doesn’t actively promote ad blockers on the Chrome Enterprise website, while challengers like Island make it a known feature.

Meanwhile, Manifest V3 — Google’s update to Chrome’s extension framework — has weakened the effectiveness of ad blocking extensions in its ecosystem. uBlock Origin, long favoured by cybersecurity professionals, is now deactivated in Chrome — with Chrome Enterprise soon to follow. This will fuel more interest in dedicated enterprise browsers like Island, who have ad blocking baked into the browser and do not depend on an ad revenue as a business model.

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