A question we've been hearing more frequently lately: does Ad-Shield recover ads for soft adblockers like AdBlock and Adblock Plus?

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The short answer is yes — absolutely.

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Why the confusion?

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If you've been following Ad-Shield, you'll know we talk a lot about dark traffic and brutal adblockers. For good reason. This segment now represents 79% of all adblocking traffic, and until recently, it had largely flown under the radar. It's undetected by analytics, invisible to existing recovery tools, and generating $0 in recovered revenue for publishers.

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That's a significant blind spot, and closing it is where we focus most of our energy.

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But it's easy to hear that message and assume we only cover brutal adblockers. That's not the case.

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The full picture

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Ad-Shield recovers ads across the full adblocking landscape — brutal and soft alike.

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Soft adblockers, including AdBlock and Adblock Plus, represent the remaining 21% of adblocking traffic. These are the tools that have dominated the conversation about adblocking for the past decade. Publishers are generally more familiar with them, and existing recovery mechanisms like Acceptable Ads (which Blockthrough relies upon) were built exclusively with this audience in mind.

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Ad-Shield handles this segment too, without any additional complexity on the publisher side. And without paying a fee to adblockers. We are not affiliated with any companies that own adblockers. Ad-Shield is completely independent and has no connection with Acceptable Ads.

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How publishers typically set this up

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There are two common approaches. Some publishers start with dark traffic recovery first — since this is the larger, previously unaddressed segment — and later expand to include soft adblockers. Others opt for full coverage from day one.

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The setup is flexible and can be adapted to where a publisher wants to start.

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What gets recovered

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Across both segments, Ad-Shield restores the full ad stack. This includes high-CPM formats like animated banners and video. Recovered CPMs are comparable to non-adblocked inventory, which means publishers aren't just recovering impressions, they're recovering revenue at meaningful rates.

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In other words: Ad-Shield supports a much wider range of ad formats than Acceptable Ads based solutions like Blockthrough. That's why most publishers either choose Option 2 from the beginning, or expand to Option 2 quickly if they started with Option 1.

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The result is 6–14% net new ad supply. That's incremental revenue generated from an audience that was previously either invisible, unmonetized, or both.

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The bottom line

Ad-Shield was built to address the parts of adblocking that legacy tools can't reach. Dark traffic is the headline — and rightly so, given its scale and how long it's gone unnoticed. But the goal has always been comprehensive coverage.

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If you're recovering ads for soft adblockers today through another solution, Ad-Shield can sit alongside or replace that. If you're not recovering anything yet, it's optimum to start with full coverage.

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Either way, no segment gets left behind.

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