Google’s search results will often show ad links as the first results. Most Pi-hole setups using ad lists will block DNS requests to Google Ads and make these links inaccessible, leading to unhappy spouses or partners who often wish to see these ads. This guide will show you how to whitelist Google Ads in Pi-hole for some devices.

Step 1

Create the following whitelist entries by clicking on the “Whitelist” menu in Pi-hole. The type should be ‘Exact whitelist’. Don’t check the wildcard checkbox.

www.googleadservices.com
dartsearch.net
www.googletagmanager.com
www.googletagservices.com
ad.doubleclick.net
clickserve.dartsearch.net
t.myvisualiq.net

Step 2

Create a new “googleads” group be clicking on the “Groups” menu in Pi-hole. The result should look like this:

Step 3

Assign the whitelisted domains to the new group by clicking on the Pi-hole menu “Domains”. The result should look like this:

The result of the Group assignment should look like this before clicking “Apply”:

Step 4

Create the client device by clicking on “Clients” in the Pi-hole menu and add the desired devices from the previous subsection to the “googleads” group.

You can select multiple groups, for example a device that is a member of the “default” group and the “googleads” group will be subject to the default assignments and google ads will be whitelisted:

End

That should be all you need to do. If you want to make sure all the changes have been applied, then execute the following command for pi-hole (FTL):

pihole restartdns reload-lists

On the client device, open Command Prompt and then execute the following command to clear Windows’ cache:

ipconfig /flushdns