# DNS filtering for small business buyers: what AI models recommend, October 2026

IT AI Recommendation Index, October 2026 Edition. Asked as "DNS filtering service" and as "DNS security solution", six framings each, to fourteen models with search on, on behalf of a small B2B company. Added to the October 2026 Edition on October 4, 2026; its answers are read by the distilled judge (ai-indexes-judge-qwen3-14b-run3), not the claude-opus-5 judge of the earlier categories. Page: https://it-ai-index.com/network/dns-filtering/smb/

**Standing:** DNSFilter leads with 51% of first choices; verdict clear leader. 57 first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts.

## First-choice share

| # | Product | Share | Negative rate | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DNSFilter | 51% | 6% | 62 |
| 2 | Cloudflare Gateway | 16% | 2% | 46 |
| 3 | Quad9 | 7% | 25% | 20 |
| 4 | Cisco Umbrella | 5% | 59% | 41 |
| 5 | Control D | 2% | 3% | 33 |
| 6 | SafeDNS | 2% | 30% | 10 |
| 7 | NextDNS | 0% | 13% | 31 |
| 8 | WebTitan | 0% | 13% | 15 |

## Each model's first choice on the direct prompt

- Claude Haiku 4.5: DNSFilter, TitanHQ WebTitan; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway, SafeDNS
- GPT-5.4 mini: Cloudflare Gateway; alternatives DNSFilter
- Gemini 3.5 Flash: DNSFilter; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway, Control D, NextDNS
- Perplexity Sonar: DNSFilter; alternatives Control D, OpenDNS, WebTitan
- Grok 4.1 Fast: DNSFilter; alternatives CleanBrowsing, NextDNS, TitanHQ, WebTitan
- Mistral Small: DNSFilter; alternatives WebTitan
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: DNSFilter; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway, Control D, NextDNS
- Llama 4 Maverick: DNSFilter
- Qwen 3.7 Flash: DNSFilter; alternatives CleanBrowsing, NextDNS
- Kimi K2: DNSFilter; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway, WebTitan
- GLM 4.7 FlashX: Control D, DNSFilter; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway
- MiniMax M2.5: no first choice
- GPT-6 Luna: DNSFilter; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway
- Muse Glimmer 30B: DNSFilter; alternatives Cloudflare Gateway

## Sources the answers cite

74 of 84 answers came back with a source list, from 14 of 14 models. Sites named in the most answers:

- cybersecuritynews.com: 52 answers, 88 citations
- controld.com: 48 answers, 125 citations
- dnsfilter.com: 44 answers, 60 citations
- simplyit.biz: 39 answers, 39 citations
- expertinsights.com: 33 answers, 41 citations
- sourceforge.net: 31 answers, 48 citations
- aimultiple.com: 31 answers, 31 citations
- thectoclub.com: 29 answers, 29 citations

Pages named in the most answers:

- https://cybersecuritynews.com/best-dns-security-solutions (41 answers)
- https://simplyit.biz/resources/best-dns-filtering-small-business-2026 (39 answers)
- https://aimultiple.com/dns-security (31 answers)
- https://thectoclub.com/tools/best-dns-security-software (29 answers)
- https://cybersecuritynews.com/bst-protective-dns-services (26 answers)
- https://expertinsights.com/web-security/the-top-dns-web-filtering-platforms-for-businesses (26 answers)
- https://controld.com/blog/best-dns-security-solutions (22 answers)
- https://geekflare.com/cybersecurity/best-dns-filtering-software (21 answers)
- https://devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-dns-filtering-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison (20 answers)
- https://comparitech.com/net-admin/dns-filtering-tools (19 answers)

## Warned against

- Cisco Umbrella: 24 of 41 labels negative. "Cisco Umbrella is usually overkill and too expensive for a small business." (Gemini 3.5 Flash, negative prompt)
- NextDNS: 4 of 31 labels negative. "Doesn't scale well for business environments; Reddit users report it "didn't hold up" under load" (Grok 4.1 Fast, negative prompt)
- DNSFilter: 4 of 62 labels negative. "Review sites for DNSFilter, Verizon DNS Safeguard, Control D, and SafeDNS show a mix of praise and recurring complaints around support, pricing, misconfigurations, and occasional outages or false positives" (GPT-5.4 mini, negative prompt)
- CleanBrowsing: 3 of 9 labels negative. "users frequently criticize its support as "atrocious." ... considered unreliable for business use" (Mistral Small, negative prompt)

## Record

- Method: https://it-ai-index.com/methodology/
- Raw judge labels and full responses: https://it-ai-index.com/data/
- License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as IT AI Recommendation Index, October 2026 Edition, it-ai-index.com.