How to change your DNS (and what it actually does)
Changing your DNS means pointing your device or router at a different resolver — the service that translates domain names like example.com into IP addresses — which can make browsing faster, add filtering, or improve privacy, but it never changes your public IP address.
What a DNS resolver actually does
Every time you type a domain name, your device asks a resolver to translate it into the IP address it needs to actually connect to. Your ISP assigns one by default, and most people never touch it — but that default resolver sees every domain you look up, in plaintext unless you take extra steps, and its speed adds a small delay to the start of every new connection you make. Resolvers also cache answers for a while so repeat lookups don’t need a fresh round trip every time, which is part of why a slow or overloaded resolver is noticeable — every uncached lookup adds latency before the actual page or app request can even begin.
Why people change it
The three usual reasons are speed, filtering, and privacy. A resolver with servers closer to you, or simply a faster backend, can shave real milliseconds off how quickly a new site starts loading — often the ISP default is not the fastest option available. Some resolvers add optional filtering, blocking known malware and phishing domains, or ad and tracker domains, before your browser even reaches them. And switching away from your ISP’s resolver stops that specific company from logging your DNS queries, though it does shift that visibility to whichever resolver you pick instead — changing resolver moves trust, it doesn’t remove it, and it only covers domain lookups, not the traffic itself; hiding the rest of your connection is a different job, handled by a VPN or proxy rather than a resolver switch. Some ISP resolvers have also been known to inject ads or redirect a mistyped domain to a search page instead of returning a plain “not found,” which is another common trigger for people to switch away from the default.
The major public resolvers
Several free public resolvers are commonly used, each documented and
independently audited to differing degrees: Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google
(8.8.8.8), and Quad9 (9.9.9.9) are the most widely known, and all
publish their own privacy policies detailing what they log and for how
long. None is universally “best” — pick based on the published policy and
any filtering features you actually want, rather than name recognition
alone. Each of these providers also publishes an IPv6 address alongside its
IPv4 one — Cloudflare’s is 2606:4700:4700::1111, for instance, in the
longer format covered in our IPv4 vs IPv6 guide —
so a resolver choice made once applies whichever IP version a given
connection ends up using. A few providers, like OpenDNS, add optional parental-control
and threat-blocking tiers on top of the base free resolver.
Where to change it, and what it doesn’t touch
You can set a resolver at the router level, which applies it to every device on your network at once, or per-device in your phone or computer’s network settings, which only affects that one device and is useful for testing without touching shared equipment. Router settings are usually under a “WAN” or “Internet” DNS field; device settings live under each OS’s network or Wi-Fi adapter properties. One thing changing DNS never does: alter your public IP address, which is what identifies you to the sites you visit — check the home page to see it stays the same before and after switching resolvers. For an extra layer, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) encrypt the lookup itself so it can’t be read or tampered with in transit, which most of these public resolvers now support and many modern browsers and operating systems can enable directly in their settings. Mobile operating systems vary in how much they expose this: recent versions of Android and iOS let you set a resolver device-wide, including one that only accepts encrypted DoH queries, while older versions may only allow it per Wi-Fi network.