My network ad blocker broke my own AdSense dashboard

When I set up AdSense for this site, the dashboard loaded, but none of the buttons worked. “Let’s go”, “Explore”, the site picker: click, nothing. No error, no spinner.

The cause was sitting under my desk: AdGuard Home, which blocks ads for every device in my house (my setup). The AdSense dashboard itself is on an unblocked domain, but the scripts behind its buttons come from the same domains that serve ads. My blocker was doing its job a little too well.

Confirming it in 30 seconds

Ask your home DNS and a public DNS server for the same names, and compare:

for d in pagead2.googlesyndication.com tpc.googlesyndication.com adservice.google.com \
         fundingchoicesmessages.google.com adsense.google.com; do
  printf '%-36s home: %-16s public: %s\n' "$d" \
    "$(dig +short $d | head -1)" "$(dig +short $d @1.1.1.1 | head -1)"
done

My result:

Domain	At home	Public DNS
pagead2.googlesyndication.com	0.0.0.0 (blocked)	real IP
tpc.googlesyndication.com	0.0.0.0 (blocked)	real IP
adservice.google.com	0.0.0.0 (blocked)	real IP
fundingchoicesmessages.google.com	0.0.0.0 (blocked)	real IP
adsense.google.com	real IP	real IP

0.0.0.0 is how AdGuard says “blocked”. The dashboard loads from adsense.google.com, but needs the others to work, and fundingchoicesmessages is Google’s consent-banner service, so the EU consent setup breaks too.

You can see the same in AdGuard’s Query log: filter by your PC’s IP and look for red “Blocked” entries while you click around.

Option 1: pause protection for a few minutes

AdGuard’s dashboard has Disable protection with a timer. Pause for 10 minutes, run ipconfig /flushdns on Windows, reload AdSense, do what you need, and protection comes back on its own. Good for a one-off.

Option 2: unblock only for your own PC

AdGuard’s custom filtering rules support a $client modifier, so an allow rule can apply to one device only. Under Filters → Custom filtering rules:

@@||googlesyndication.com^$client='192.168.1.50'
@@||doubleclick.net^$client='192.168.1.50'
@@||adservice.google.com^$client='192.168.1.50'
@@||googleadservices.com^$client='192.168.1.50'
@@||fundingchoicesmessages.google.com^$client='192.168.1.50'

Replace the IP with your PC’s address (give it a DHCP reservation so it doesn’t change). @@ means “allow”, and ||domain^ covers the domain and all its subdomains. The rest of the house stays ad-free.

The side effect: that PC now sees ads on other websites too. If you only need AdSense now and then, option 1 is less annoying.

Also check the browser

A browser extension like uBlock Origin causes exactly the same symptoms. Allow adsense.google.com there as well, or the network fix won’t seem to work.

One upside

With the blocker active, I never see the ads on my own site. That’s actually fine: you’re never supposed to click your own ads anyway. Google treats it as invalid traffic and can close the account over it.