Is AdGuard a Russian company?

Is AdGuard a Russian company? The short answer

AdGuard is a Russian company by origin, founded in Moscow in 2009, but the company behind it today is Adguard Software Limited, registered in Limassol, Cyprus. That Cypriot company is the one AdGuard's privacy policies name as the data controller.

So the honest answer has two halves. By origin, yes. By legal registration today, no: it is a Cypriot company that says it operates under EU law. Neither half tells you much about what happens to your DNS queries. That is the part that matters to most readers, and it gets most of the space below.

Where the Russia question comes from

The founding facts are not in dispute. AdGuard itself wrote, in a 2022 statement answering the app store Setapp: "AdGuard was founded in 2009 in Moscow." Its press room gives the exact date as 1 June 2009 and the headquarters as Limassol, Cyprus. Wikipedia says the same thing in one line: AdGuard was founded as a private company in Moscow in 2009, then later moved its headquarters to Cyprus.

The year of that move is the detail people argue about, and you cannot settle it from AdGuard's own pages. Its about page, press room, contacts page, privacy policy and the 2022 statement all describe the Cyprus headquarters. None of them gives the year of the move. Forum posts name a year, but a forum post is not a record. If the date matters to you, check the Cyprus company registry under the name Adguard Software Limited.

The registered office in the privacy policy is Anexartisias and Athinon 79, Nora Court, Flat/Office 203-205, 3040 Limassol, Cyprus.

What AdGuard says about its jurisdiction and servers

These are AdGuard's statements about itself. They are worth reading in its own words, and they are claims, not independent findings.

On jurisdiction, the about page says: "Headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus, we operate under the EU privacy laws and are fully GDPR-compliant." GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU law on personal data.

On why it moved, the 2022 statement says: "Later we moved our HQ to Cyprus as a conscious decision, in order to operate under the EU law."

On infrastructure, the same statement says: "AdGuard apps do not connect to any servers in Russia. ... AdGuard servers are located in Frankfurt, Germany, and the apps do not communicate to any servers in Russia." The AdGuard DNS privacy policy also says the data is stored in "our own data center located in Frankfurt".

On staff, the 2022 statement is more open than many readers expect. It says that "historically the majority of AdGuard developers and other employees have been working from Moscow", and that many were relocating to Cyprus and other countries at the time. It also says some employees work from Ukraine. That describes 2022. It does not tell you where the staff sit today.

What critics allege, and what they do not show

The sharpest criticism is on forums. A long Privacy Guides thread, "Can AdGuard VPN be trusted?", is a good example. These are posts by community members, not the position of Privacy Guides itself.

One poster in July 2023 wrote: "It seems to me that AdGuard is somehow cooperating with the Russian authorities." Another poster in July 2024 argued that the Cyprus headquarters is a shell and that the real operations are still in Russia. That poster pointed to LinkedIn profiles and asked how the company handles certain Russian payments. These are claims. The thread does not link evidence for them, and they are repeated here only as claims.

The same thread holds the replies. A moderator wrote in October 2023: "There is no reason to believe that is the case", and noted that AdGuard has staff in Ukraine. Another member wrote in July 2024: "There is no hard evidence they are somehow colluding with the Russian government in any way."

The fair summary: the Moscow origin and the Moscow staffing history are facts AdGuard states itself. A present-day link to the Russian state is an allegation that nobody in that thread backed with evidence.

What the 2022 block in Russia does and does not prove

AdGuard's own blog reports that AdGuard VPN was blocked in Russia in July 2022. The post, dated 29 July 2022, says: "On July 27, blocking authorities reached AdGuard VPN." As a side effect, it says, "the entire adguard.com domain became unavailable for Russian users".

The AdGuard DNS blog described the effect on DNS users in Russia. For people who had typed AdGuard DNS addresses into their device settings, "the blocking disrupts access to the Internet". AdGuard suggested changing the domain names in those settings. It also warned that licence-key checks and update checks in its apps might not work. That post was last updated on 7 April 2023.

What this shows: AdGuard VPN was treated as a blocked service in Russia. That is consistent with a service that does not operate as a compliant Russian-registered VPN provider.

What it does not show: anything about ownership, the nationality of staff, or past ties. A block is a decision about one service. AdGuard does not say who ordered it or on what legal basis. So it is evidence about the block, and not about the company's loyalties in either direction.

Who can see your DNS queries: the question that matters more

For a DNS resolver, the founders' passports matter less than three practical questions. Who can see your queries? What is kept, and for how long? Which courts can force the operator to hand it over?

DNS (Domain Name System) is the lookup that turns a name such as example.com into an IP address. Every lookup tells the resolver which site you are about to visit, and when. If how DNS lookups work is new to you, start there. The resolver is the operator that sees this list. A resolver run by people you trust, but which logs every query with your IP address, is a worse deal than one run by strangers that keeps nothing.

What AdGuard's DNS privacy policy says it keeps

The AdGuard DNS privacy policy treats the free public service and the account-based private service differently.

For public AdGuard DNS, the policy says: "We do not process any of your Personal Data when you connect to and use public AdGuard DNS." It also says: "We keep and store an anonymous database of domains requested in the last 24 hours," and that nothing in it could link a domain name to the user who asked for it. Aggregate usage statistics are gathered too, and the policy says they are not linked to you.

For private AdGuard DNS, the one you configure through an account dashboard, more is kept, because you asked for it. The policy says query logs are stored so you can see them in the dashboard. You can turn them off, and they are only stored for a limited period. Anonymized IP addresses, limited to the subnet, are logged only when you enable that option.

The public service comes in three variants: the default filtering service, a non-filtering one, and a family filter. Each has its own plain IP addresses, listed on AdGuard's setup page. The encrypted endpoints use the names dns.adguard-dns.com, unfiltered.adguard-dns.com and family.adguard-dns.com. On Android these names are what you type into the Private DNS field, which Android's Private DNS setting explains step by step.

What Cypriot and EU jurisdiction means in practice

A company answers to the law where it is registered, and to the law where its servers sit. For AdGuard, by its own account, that is Cyprus for the company and Germany for the servers in Frankfurt. Both are EU member states, so the GDPR applies. The complaint section of the privacy policy points to the Cyprus data protection authority, which is the regulator it names for complaints.

What jurisdiction cannot do is create data that does not exist. A court order can only reach what the operator stores. Public AdGuard DNS says it keeps an anonymous 24-hour list of domains and no personal data. If that is true, that list is the most any court in any country could get from that service. If you turn on query logs in a private account, those logs become reachable too. The policy is the operator's promise. You cannot audit it from outside, and the same is true of every public resolver.

Check which resolver you are using now

Before you decide whether to trust AdGuard, find out who sees your queries today. On an Ubuntu server or desktop that uses systemd-resolved, run:

resolvectl status

Look at the Current DNS Server: line for each link. That address belongs to the operator that sees every name your machine looks up right now. Often it is your hosting provider, or your home router forwarding to your internet provider.

To try AdGuard's public resolver without changing any settings, send it one query directly:

sudo apt install -y dnsutils
dig @unfiltered.adguard-dns.com example.com +short

This uses the non-filtering server. A healthy result is one or more IP addresses for example.com. A timeout means the query never got an answer, often because your network blocks outbound UDP port 53. If you switch resolvers and old answers persist, flushing the DNS cache on Ubuntu clears them.

Other public resolvers, by jurisdiction

Every public resolver puts you under some operator and some country. Here are a few, described by who runs them and what their own pages say. This is not a ranking of which one is safe.

• Quad9 is run by a Swiss foundation, c/o SWITCH in Zürich. Its privacy policy says: "Quad9 does not collect or record user IP addresses." It refers to Swiss data protection law and the GDPR, and says it keeps data mainly as counters.
• Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 is run by Cloudflare, Inc., a US company in San Francisco. Its privacy policy says it "does not log personal information, and the bulk of the limited non-personally identifiable query data is only stored for 25 hours." It also says aggregated data may be kept indefinitely.
• DNS4EU is operated by Whalebone, s.r.o. in Brno, Czech Republic. Its site says resolution runs "on EU infrastructure, under EU rules," and that the project was co-funded by the EU from 2023 to 2025. Its home page states no logging policy, so read its privacy policy before you rely on it.
• Mullvad (Mullvad VPN AB, Gothenburg, Sweden) runs a public encrypted DNS service, but its help page says that service "will be discontinued on November 2, 2026". Do not set it up now.

These jurisdiction questions apply to more than DNS. The same reasoning about where a company sits and what it can be ordered to hand over appears in whether Tailscale is a Canadian company.

The exit: run AdGuard Home on your own VPS

If you would rather not trust any resolver operator, run the resolver yourself. AdGuard Home is AdGuard's self-hosted DNS server. Its project page describes it as a "Network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server". It is published under the GPL-3.0 licence, so you can read the code you run. On a VPS you control, the query logs live on your disk, and you decide whether they exist at all.

One thing does not go away. AdGuard Home sends the lookups it cannot answer itself to upstream DNS servers that you choose. It supports encrypted upstreams over DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS and DNSCrypt, so your hosting provider cannot read those queries in transit. The upstream still sees them, though now it sees your server's IP address and not your phone's. The difference between the hosted service and the self-hosted one is laid out in AdGuard DNS vs AdGuard Home. If you route your devices to that server over a tunnel, getting DNS to work over WireGuard covers the usual failures.

FAQ

Is AdGuard a Russian company?

AdGuard was founded in Moscow on 1 June 2009, so it has Russian origins. The company today is Adguard Software Limited, registered in Limassol, Cyprus, and it says it operates under EU privacy law. AdGuard also says that historically most of its developers worked from Moscow, and that many were relocating in 2022.

When did AdGuard move to Cyprus?

AdGuard does not publish the year. Its about page, press room and 2022 statement describe the Cyprus headquarters but give no date for the move. Forum posts name a year without a primary source. The Cyprus company registry, searched under Adguard Software Limited, is where to confirm it.

Does AdGuard DNS log my queries?

For public AdGuard DNS, the privacy policy says no personal data is processed. It keeps an anonymous database of domains requested in the last 24 hours, with nothing linking them to a user. For private AdGuard DNS with an account, query logs are kept for the dashboard. You can turn them off, and IP logging, limited to the subnet, happens only if you enable it.

Was AdGuard blocked in Russia?

Yes. AdGuard's blog says "blocking authorities" reached AdGuard VPN on 27 July 2022, and the whole adguard.com domain became unavailable to Russian users. AdGuard DNS users in Russia lost internet access if they had typed AdGuard DNS addresses into device settings. The block shows how one service was treated in Russia, not who owns the company.

Can I use AdGuard filtering without trusting AdGuard's servers?

Yes. Run AdGuard Home, the GPL-3.0 open source DNS server, on a VPS you control. Your query logs then stay on your own disk. AdGuard Home still forwards lookups it cannot answer itself to an upstream resolver you choose, and it can send them encrypted over DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS.