Three problems that look the same
From the outside, it always looks like “my ad blocker doesn’t work on YouTube any more”. In practice there are three separate problems, and telling them apart saves a lot of trial and error:
- A warning that mentions ad blockers, sometimes followed by videos that refuse to play: YouTube has detected your blocker.
- A black screen at the start of each video, about as long as an ad, and no ad: your blocker removed the ad, and YouTube is making you wait anyway.
- Ads everywhere, as if nothing were installed: the extension is probably off. In Chrome, since July 2025, that is very likely the reason.
What YouTube changed
YouTube states its position on its help page, in plain words: “When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service”, and “If you continue to use ad blockers, we may block your video playback” (YouTube Help). That’s YouTube’s rule; what you do with it is your decision. The warnings began as a test in 2023 and went worldwide that autumn: YouTube confirmed a “global effort” to The Verge (TechCrunch, 1 November 2023).
In June 2025, users of several blockers started reporting a black screen at the start of videos, lasting about as long as a pre-roll ad, with a pop-up asking “Experiencing interruptions?” that leads to a help page about ad blockers (PCWorld, 13 June 2025).
Then the browsers moved. With Chrome 138, in July 2025, Chrome switched off Manifest V2 extensions for everyone, and uBlock Origin, the most widely used blocking extension, is one of them (Chrome for Developers). The options that remain are covered in uBlock Origin after Manifest V3.
Detection and delay are two different problems
The fixes make sense once you know how an ad reaches the player. The YouTube player doesn’t pick ads itself: it asks YouTube’s servers what to play, and the answer contains the video and the list of ads to show before or during it. A blocker either deletes that list or stops the requests for the ads.
Detection happens in the page. YouTube’s scripts check whether the expected ad really played, or whether something was tampered with. When they notice, you get the warning. It’s a race between YouTube’s scripts and the blockers’ filters, and the answer is almost always newer filters.
The delay is something else. When the player has been told to play an ad and can’t, it waits before starting the video. The ad is gone; the wait isn’t. New filters don’t help here. What helps is making sure no ad is scheduled in the first place, so there is nothing to wait for.
Fixes that depend on your extension
- Update its filters. In uBlock Origin, open the dashboard, go to the Filter lists tab, click Purge all caches, then Update now. uBlock Origin Lite can’t be forced: its built-in rules only change when the extension itself updates (uBO Lite FAQ).
- Keep one blocker, not two. uBlock Origin’s own page is blunt: “Do NOT use uBO with any other content blocker”, because other blockers “can prevent uBO’s privacy or anti-blocker-defusing features from working correctly” (uBlock Origin).
- Check the extension is still on. In Chrome, a greyed-out uBlock Origin marked as no longer supported won’t come back. See your options after Manifest V3.
- Test without it. Google’s own advice is to try YouTube in a private window with every extension disabled (PCWorld). If videos play normally there, your connection is fine and the problem is the blocker.
If the warning comes back after all that, what’s left is waiting for the next filter update, or changing method.
Cleaning YouTube before the browser sees it
Extensions work inside the browser, where YouTube’s scripts can look for them. Another approach is to clean YouTube’s traffic on the way in, before the browser gets it. That’s what AdHole does on a Windows or Linux PC: it rewrites the player’s request so that YouTube answers without ads, so on this computer, videos start without ads, in your browser. It also usually avoids the waiting screen YouTube shows when it can’t play an ad.
It isn’t an extension, so Chrome’s extension rules don’t apply to it. On Windows, it covers every browser on the PC: Chrome, Edge, Brave and Firefox (version 120 and later). It’s free, with no account.
What it doesn’t do, said plainly:
- It only works in the browsers of this computer. The YouTube app on a TV, a console or a phone keeps its ads: there, they come from the same servers as the video, and nothing on the network can tell them apart. Why Pi-hole can’t remove them either.
- It has to see inside YouTube’s traffic. For that, it installs a root certificate created on your own computer, whose private key never leaves it, and it looks inside the HTTPS traffic of this PC, except on a list of sites it leaves encrypted. That’s a real trade-off, worth thinking about before you install it.
- There’s no guarantee. No blocker stops every ad, and YouTube can change its side at any time.
The limit that is spreading
Every method in this article, extensions and AdHole alike, relies on one thing: the ads arrive separately from the video, labelled as ads. Google also stitches ads into the video stream itself, known as server-side ad insertion. AdGuard reported seeing it as early as July 2024 and wrote that “there is no foolproof remedy” (AdGuard); in August 2026 it wrote that YouTube now uses it “frequently” (AdGuard).
So it is no longer just a test. On those videos there is no list left to remove: the ad is part of the stream. uBlock Origin skips it automatically once it starts, according to a member of its team; AdHole can’t skip an ad that has already started. If the technique becomes the norm, the only way to watch YouTube without ads on every screen will be the ad-free plan YouTube charges for.
Sources checked on 5 October 2026 and linked in the text.