How to stop targeted ads following you around

You glance at a pair of shoes once, and suddenly they’re in every ad on every site for a fortnight. It’s not a coincidence and it’s not your phone “listening” — it’s targeted advertising, built on a web of trackers that follow you from site to site. Here’s how it works and how to break the chain.

How the ads find you

Most sites embed trackers from advertising networks. When you visit, those trackers note what you looked at and tie it to a profile of you — built from cookies, your IP address, and your device fingerprint. Because the same networks are embedded across thousands of sites, they stitch your activity together into a detailed picture of your interests, then sell ads against it. That’s why the shoes follow you.

The steps that actually work

Stack these for a big reduction in tracking:

1. Use a tracker and ad blocker. This is the single most effective step — it stops the tracking scripts from loading at all. Our apps include ad and tracker blocking across your device.
2. Clear cookies regularly, or use private browsing, so profiles can’t persist.
3. Turn off ad personalisation in your Google, and device, privacy settings.
4. Use a VPN to hide the IP address that ties your activity to a location.
5. Be sparing about which accounts you stay logged into while browsing.

A realistic expectation

You won’t make yourself invisible to advertising entirely — some tracking is baked into how the web works. But blocking trackers and clearing the signals they rely on dramatically cuts how well anyone can profile you, and the creepy “it’s following me” effect largely stops. Start with a blocker and a VPN; run our Privacy Check to see the difference in what you expose.