Researchers in Switzerland and the US have devised a new machine learning approach to the detection of website advertising material that's based on the way such material interacts with the browser, rather than by analyzing its content or network behavior – two approaches which have proved ineffective in the long term in the face of CNAME cloaking (see below). Dubbed WebGraph, the framework uses a graph-based AI ad-blocking approach to detect promotional content by concentrating on such essential activities of network advertising – including telemetry attempts and local browser storage – that the only effective evasion technique would be to not conduct these activities. Though previous approaches have achieved slightly higher detection rates than WebGraph, all of them are prone to evasive techniques, while WebGraph is able to approach 100% integrity in the face of adversarial responses, including more sophisticated hypothesized responses that may emerge in the face of this novel ad-blocking method. The paper is led by two researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in concert with researchers from University of California, Davis and the University of Iowa. The work is a development from a 2020 research initiative with Brave browser called AdGraph, which featured two of the researchers from the new paper.

Brave has developed AI technology called AdGraph that outperforms conventional ad-blocking technology, the browser startup said Friday. "We can train supervised machine learning models to automatically block ads and trackers," researchers from Brave and four universities said in a research paper. "We found that AdGraph replicates the behavior of popular crowdsourced filter lists with an 97.7 percent accuracy. In addition, AdGraph is able to detect a significant number of ads and tracker which are missed by popular crowdsourced filter lists." Ad-blocking browser extensions like Adblock Plus today typically use manually maintained filter lists such as Easylist to determine what's an ad and what's not.