Public DNS servers with filtering: a verified list of what each IP really blocks

Public DNS servers with filtering are free resolvers that refuse to answer lookups for known malware, phishing, or adult-content domains. The dependable options are Cloudflare (1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3), Quad9 (9.9.9.9), AdGuard DNS, CleanBrowsing, ControlD, OpenDNS FamilyShield, and Mullvad. The exact IP you pick matters more than the provider, because the lists people copy from forums often mislabel them.

A resolver is the service that turns a name like example.com into an address your machine can connect to. A filtered resolver is a phone book with the con artists' numbers torn out: ask for a known-bad name and it simply refuses to answer. Nothing to install, nothing to pay. You change one setting and every lookup on that device passes through the filter.

We verified every address on this page against the providers' own documentation on 28 July 2026. That check exists because the versions of this list circulating on social media and forums get roughly a third of the labels wrong. Some of those errors are harmless. A few point a "family filter" at an address that does no family filtering at all.

Why servers should care, not just parents

Filtered DNS is usually pitched at home routers. It earns a place on servers too. Almost every piece of malware that lands on a host eventually asks DNS for the name of its command and control point, the server it reports back to. Point your fleet's outbound resolution at a malware-blocking resolver and some of those callbacks fail on their own. Security agencies call this practice protective DNS (PDNS), and the free resolvers below are the zero-budget version of it: one cheap layer in a broader server hardening stack, not a substitute for detection, but a tripwire that costs one line of configuration.

The verified list: pick your goal, take the pair

Start from what you want blocked, not from the provider. Each short table below covers one goal. Addresses come in pairs; use both, and keep both in the same tier.

One more thing before the addresses. Providers add and change tiers, so every provider name below links straight to its official tier documentation: any row can be re-checked in seconds. Every address was last verified against those pages on 28 July 2026. If a provider's page and this table ever disagree, trust the provider's page, and tell us so we can fix the row.

Block malware and phishing

Family and adult-content filtering

Block ads and trackers

No filtering at all

Two niche tiers do not fit the tables above: ControlD Social (76.76.2.3, 76.76.10.3) blocks social media platforms, and Mullvad's extended (194.242.2.5) and all (194.242.2.9) tiers stack social media, and in the case of all, every category the provider filters, onto the base list.

In prose, the short version: Google filters nothing. The difference between Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, 1.1.1.2, and 1.1.1.3 is only the filter: the first resolves everything, the second adds malware blocking, the third blocks malware plus adult content, and blocked names answer 0.0.0.0. Quad9 blocks malware and phishing on 9.9.9.9 and offers no content filtering of any kind. AdGuard's default tier is about ads and trackers, with a separate family pair. CleanBrowsing splits security, adult, and family into three tiers of rising strictness. ControlD ships six free tiers from unfiltered to family. Mullvad filters up to six categories but only over encrypted DNS. OpenDNS does phishing by default and family filtering on its FamilyShield pair.

Five mislabels that keep circulating

These are the errors we found in the widely shared version of this list. Each one is the kind that fails silently: the resolver answers fine, so nothing looks broken, and the filter you think you have is not there.

1. CleanBrowsing 185.228.168.9 is not a family filter. It is the Security Filter: malware, phishing, and spam only. CleanBrowsing's own documentation states it does not block adult content. The real Family Filter pair is 185.228.168.168 and 185.228.169.168.

2. Quad9 has no family tier at all. 9.9.9.11 is the same malware blocklist as 9.9.9.9 with EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) enabled, a mechanism that shares part of your network address with content delivery networks for better geographic routing. Quad9 states plainly that it does no content filtering.

3. ControlD's 76.76.2.1 is the malware tier, not family. The Family Friendly resolver is 76.76.2.4. Point a child's device at .1 and adult content resolves normally.

4. Mullvad's 194.242.2.4 and .5 do no adult filtering, and none of Mullvad's IPs answer plain DNS. Those two are the base and extended tiers (malware and social media, no adult category). The family tier, 194.242.2.6, is missing from most reposts entirely. And Mullvad serves DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT) only, so typing these IPs into a router's ordinary DNS fields does nothing.

5. OpenDNS 208.67.220.220 is the standard secondary, not a family filter. The family product is FamilyShield, on 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123, which also blocks proxy and anonymizer sites.

Set it up without surprises

Pick the tier for the job. On servers, use a malware tier such as Quad9's 9.9.9.9 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.2; family tiers block categories a server never needs and can break legitimate lookups. On a family network, take the family pair from one provider and use both of its addresses.

The classic mistake is mixing tiers. Most systems treat primary and secondary DNS as a pool, not a strict failover order, so a lookup can go to either address at any moment. Set a family filter as primary and an unfiltered 8.8.8.8 as secondary and the filter is off for a share of your traffic from day one. Both entries must come from the same tier. And for a whole household, set the pair once in the router's DNS settings instead of per device: everything on the network inherits it.

Pick your platform:

[Resolve]
DNS=9.9.9.9 149.112.112.112
FallbackDNS=1.1.1.2 1.0.0.2

networksetup -listallnetworkservices
networksetup -setdnsservers Wi-Fi 9.9.9.9 149.112.112.112
networksetup -getdnsservers Wi-Fi

Get-DnsClientServerAddress
Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias "Ethernet" -ServerAddresses ("9.9.9.9","149.112.112.112")
ipconfig /flushdns

Verify it, whatever the platform

To confirm which resolver a host is actually using, and that the filter answers:

resolvectl status | grep 'DNS Servers'
dig +short example.com @1.1.1.2

A normal domain returns its real addresses. For a domain on Cloudflare's malware list, the documented behavior is an answer of 0.0.0.0: run the same lookup against 1.1.1.1 and 1.1.1.2, and a filtered name resolves normally on the first while the second returns 0.0.0.0. On Windows, where dig is not installed, nslookup example.com 1.1.1.2 plays the same role; on macOS, dig ships with the system. That pair of lookups is the whole verification, and it is worth running once after setup rather than trusting the label on a list.

Where DNS filtering stops helping

A filtered resolver only blocks what asks DNS for a known-bad name. Three things walk straight past it.

First, attacks that live on legitimate domains. Malware that runs its command channel through Microsoft 365 calendar entries or Microsoft Teams relay servers makes lookups any filter must allow, because blocking them would break the product for everyone. Second, malware that skips your resolver: a hardcoded IP address or a built-in DoH client never touches the DNS you configured. Third, freshness. Blocklists are curated and updated on the providers' schedules, and shared attack infrastructure rotates domains faster than any list tracks them.

So treat filtered DNS as what it is: a free layer that removes the lazy end of the threat, silently. It blocks, but it does not tell you what tried. The lookup that got refused on a server that should never browse the web is a signal worth investigating, and that visibility comes from your logs and your detection stack, not from the resolver.