CIPA-Compliant Web Filtering

The CIPA web filter built for schools, districts & libraries

Block what the law requires. Keep what classrooms need. Follow every device home. Hand auditors the evidence—not a story.

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Million domains
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AI tools tracked
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Content categories
CIPA
Compliance aligned
The promise

Every E-Rate district has made the same commitment

Minors on your network will not reach obscene material, child sexual abuse material, or content harmful to them. Keeping that promise across thousands of students and a web that adds hundreds of thousands of domains daily is what a CIPA web filter does—and all we build.

120M+ domains, classified by category

Policy decisions happen by category rather than by chasing individual URLs. A technology director sets one rule—block adult content for students, everywhere, always—and every matching site is covered automatically, including ones registered this morning.

SafeSearch, grade bands & off-campus coverage

The same engine that powers category filtering also enforces SafeSearch on major platforms, applies grade-band policies from kindergarten to senior year, and follows 1:1 devices home.

Blocks what it should—nothing more

Good filtering does not wall off the internet until teaching becomes impossible, force a librarian to defend a block she cannot explain, or treat every student as the same user. Category-based policy by grade band keeps the law and your community requirements while leaving the rest open for learning.

A quick tour, then a demo

Below is a quick tour of what the platform does, who it serves, and how a rollout actually goes. When you are ready to see it against your own traffic, a demo takes about thirty minutes.

What we do

Everything a district needs from a CIPA web filter

Six capabilities, one categorized database underneath. Start with the piece most urgent for you—they all work together.

School Web Filtering

Category-based filtering tuned for classrooms: harmful content blocked by default, education and reference left open, exceptions granted in seconds.

CIPA Compliance

The technology protection measure your E-Rate certification depends on, plus category-level records that show auditors exactly what is enforced.

AI Tools Blocklist

16,328+ AI-tool domains—essay writers, homework solvers, deepfake and companion apps—organized so you allow instruction and block the rest.

District-Wide Filtering

One policy language across every building, delegated admin for site techs, and consolidated reporting the central office can actually use.

Off-Campus & 1:1 Devices

Policy that travels with managed Chromebooks and laptops, so the take-home hours are filtered the same way third period is.

DNS Filtering

Lightweight, appliance-free enforcement at the DNS layer—a fast path to compliant filtering for smaller schools and libraries.

The data underneath

A filter is only as good as its database

Blocking decisions are data decisions. Ours rest on one of the largest continuously refreshed domain classification datasets anywhere—see the full breakdown on our coverage page.

0M+
Domains categorized
57+
Content categories
Daily
Classification updates
~300k
New domains screened / day
Who it’s for

Built for the people who answer for student safety

Different chairs, same accountability. The platform gives each role the piece they need without making anyone a full-time filter administrator.

Technology Directors
IT Staff & Network Admins
Librarians & Media Specialists

You sign the certification and own the outcome

You get one policy console for the whole district, audit-ready category reports, and a vendor whose entire product is the thing you are certifying.

Single console for all buildings and grade bands
Category-level audit reports for E-Rate certification
Dedicated CIPA focus—not a general-purpose security suite

You field the tickets—make them go away

Cloud or on-premise deployment, no per-school appliances required, HTTPS traffic handled, and exceptions that take seconds instead of a change-request cycle.

Cloud-first—no hardware to rack in every building
HTTPS filtering without breaking encrypted traffic
Per-site exceptions in seconds, scoped to one group

You defend both safety and access

Category-based decisions are explainable to a parent or a board member, research resources stay reachable, and CIPA-required blocking never turns into blanket censorship.

Every block cites a category—explainable, defensible
Education and reference categories open by default
Adult patron access configurable for public libraries
Compliance

CIPA compliance, handled the way auditors read it

The Children’s Internet Protection Act ties E-Rate discounts to three commitments: a technology protection measure, an adopted internet safety policy, and monitoring plus education. The filter is the technical half—and the half you prove with data.

Our CIPA web filtering maps the required content directly onto named categories blocked by default for minors and logged continuously. When certification season arrives, you export category-level evidence instead of reconstructing a year of decisions from memory.

  • Required categories blocked by default in every student policy
  • Category-level logs and reports that satisfy audit requests
  • SafeSearch enforced on major search and video platforms
  • No forced over-blocking—CIPA does not require banning social media, and neither do we

What certification actually asks of you

FilterA technology protection measure, enforced
PolicyAn internet safety policy on file
MonitoringMinors’ online activity monitored
EducationStudents taught appropriate online behavior

We supply the first line outright and the evidence trail for the rest. Full details →

16,328+ AI tools, sorted so you can act

Essay writers & paraphrasers Homework & code solvers Image generators Deepfake & face-swap (200+) Voice cloning (250+) AI companion chat (470+)

18 categories and 165+ subcategories, updated daily from a screen of roughly 300,000 newly registered domains. Delivered as CSV, DNS/RPZ blocklist, PAC or hosts files, firewall EDL, or API.

AI tools

The AI problem your current filter cannot see

New AI tools launch every week, and most legacy filters file them under a vague “technology” category or miss them entirely. Meanwhile teachers are grading AI-written essays, counselors are handling deepfake incidents, and students are pasting personal information into chatbots nobody has vetted.

Our bundled AI tools blocklist treats this as its own discipline: every tool categorized by what it actually does, so you can permit the AI your instruction plan calls for while holding back essay mills, companion chat, and face-swap apps.

  • Academic integrity: essay writers and homework solvers blocked as a class
  • Student safety: deepfake, voice-clone and companion tools contained
  • Data privacy: fewer ungoverned tools collecting student information
Read about the AI tools blocklist →
How it works

From first call to filtered district in four steps

Cloud deployments have gone live in an afternoon. Most districts take a deliberate two to four weeks so staff are never surprised by a block page.

1

Point traffic at the filter

Choose cloud—no appliance, enforced by DNS or a lightweight agent—or on-premise if policy requires filtering to stay inside your network.

2

Set policy by grade band

Start from a CIPA-aligned baseline, then tighten for elementary and open up for high school. Policies attach to user groups and buildings.

3

Extend to take-home devices

Push the same policy to managed Chromebooks and laptops so filtering follows students home—the gap that sinks more compliance stories than any other.

4

Report, review, certify

Category-level reporting shows the board what is blocked and why, feeds your E-Rate paperwork, and surfaces the decisions that genuinely need a human.

Under the hood

What happens in the moment a student clicks

The best filter is one nobody notices. When a student opens a page, the request is checked against a categorized view of that domain in milliseconds—the filter reads which content categories the site belongs to, compares them against the policy for that user, grade band and time of day, and either serves the page, shows a friendly block notice, or lets it through with SafeSearch enforced.

Because one site can be several things at once, domains carry multiple category labels rather than a single verdict. A streaming platform can be Video, User-Generated and Adult all at the same time, and your policy weighs all three.

  • Domain classified before the request completes—no lag a student would notice
  • Policy resolved by user group and grade band, not just IP address
  • The strictest applicable category wins, so mixed sites fail safe
  • Every decision logged with a named category for later reporting

Change the user to a third grader and the same lookup returns a block—same database, same domain, a different defensible answer.

One request, start to finish

ClickStudent opens example-media-site.com
LookupCategories = Video, Streaming, User-Generated
PolicyGrade 9–12, Video allowed, SafeSearch on
CheckNo Adult / Self-harm label present
Allowed—logged by category
Plans

Priced for a single school or an entire state

Every tier is cloud-first with no per-appliance fees, built to fit E-Rate-funded environments. Quotes are sized to your enrollment, not a one-size rate card.

Single School

Core category filtering, SafeSearch enforcement and baseline reporting for one building.

District + AI Blocklist

Everything in District plus the 16,328+ AI-tools blocklist in every delivery format.

Enterprise / State

Custom deployment, on-premise option and SLA for consortia and state programs.

Resources

Do your homework before you buy

Guides written for the questions we hear from technology directors every week—no registration walls, no sales gate.

What Is CIPA?

The law in plain English: what it requires, what it does not, and who it applies to.

Compliance Checklist

A step-by-step worksheet for getting your certification story in order.

E-Rate & CIPA Funding

How the discount program and the filtering requirement fit together.

Domain Coverage

The numbers behind the filter: 120M+ domains, 57+ categories, daily updates.

Straight answers

Common concerns about school filtering, addressed

Filtering carries baggage from a decade ago, when filters were blunt, slow and famous for blocking the wrong things. Here is where the reality now sits.

“Filters block half of what teachers need”

That reputation came from single-label blocklists. Education and reference categories stay open by default, domains carry multiple labels, and a teacher’s exception is granted in seconds for one site and one group.

“CIPA means we have to ban social media”

It does not. CIPA requires blocking obscene material, CSAM, and content harmful to minors—not social platforms. You decide social media policy locally, by grade band and time of day.

“Students will just use a proxy or VPN”

Proxy and anonymizer domains are their own filtering category, classified as they appear. New proxies registered this week are caught the same way any new domain is.

“HTTPS makes filtering pointless now”

Nearly all traffic is encrypted, and a filter that gives up at the padlock is not really filtering. Ours classifies and enforces at the domain level, so encrypted sites are covered—no blind spot where the modern web lives.

“Filtering is surveillance of kids”

The goal is safety and compliance, not spying. Category-level reporting shows what was blocked and why—the records a counselor needs if a student searches around self-harm—without turning routine browsing into a dossier.

“It’s a huge project to run”

Most work is front-loaded into initial policy. After that the database classifies new sites on its own, so the ongoing job is reviewing a short queue of exception requests—work a part-time administrator owns alongside other duties.
Why switch

Why districts switch their CIPA web filter to us

Escaping, not shopping

Most districts we talk to are not buying their first filter—they are escaping one. The stories rhyme: an appliance approaching end-of-life with a five-figure refresh quote, a legacy category list that has not learned a new site since the contract started, take-home Chromebooks falling off the filter the moment they leave the parking lot.

The comparison does the selling

Because our cloud tiers need no hardware, a pilot runs alongside your current filter—same users, same sites, two verdicts. Districts typically discover legitimate classroom sites their old filter had been silently blocking for years, and a long tail of new domains their old database had simply never met.

The deeper reason is philosophical

Filtering built for enterprises treats schools as small businesses with louder stakeholders. Filtering built for CIPA starts from the certification you sign, the grade bands you teach, and the board meeting where you may have to explain a single blocked page. That second thing is what we build—and all we build.

Questions

CIPA web filtering, asked and answered

What exactly makes a web filter “CIPA-compliant”?
CIPA certifies institutions, not products. A filter supports your compliance when it reliably blocks obscene material, child sexual abuse material, and content harmful to minors, and gives you enforcement records that back your E-Rate certification. That is precisely what our category policies and reporting are designed around—alongside your internet safety policy and student education, which the law also requires and which no software can adopt for you.
Do we need to install hardware in every building?
No. The cloud deployment needs no appliances and can cover every building and take-home device from one console. Districts with a policy requirement to keep filtering in-house can run the same categorized database on-premise instead.
Does filtering follow students home on 1:1 Chromebooks?
Yes. Policy attaches to the managed device rather than the school network, so a district Chromebook is filtered identically on home Wi-Fi, a hotspot, or at the public library. Off-campus coverage is part of the District tiers, not an add-on.
Will a CIPA filter block sites teachers legitimately need?
Far less than the filters you may remember. Because domains carry multiple categories and education categories stay open by default, legitimate resources pass cleanly—and when a teacher needs an exception, an administrator grants it for one site and one group in seconds rather than opening a hole district-wide.
How do you keep up with brand-new websites and AI tools?
New domains are classified as they appear rather than after someone complains. Roughly 300,000 newly registered domains are screened every day for the AI blocklist alone, and category data across the 120M+ domain database updates daily—so a site that launched this morning already belongs to a category your policy covers.
How does this relate to E-Rate funding?
E-Rate discounts require the CIPA certification, and the filter is how you honor it. Our plans avoid per-appliance costs that complicate E-Rate budgeting, and your quote will spell out exactly how filtering fits your funding picture—bring the question to your demo and we will walk through it.
Does the same platform work for public libraries?
Yes. Libraries carry their own CIPA obligations when they take E-Rate discounts, with the added wrinkle that adult patrons may request unfiltered access for lawful use. Policies by user group handle exactly that split: minors filtered to the CIPA baseline, adult sessions configured to your library’s policy, one set of records for both.
How long does a rollout really take?
A cloud pilot for one building can be live the week you approve it, because there is no hardware to order or rack. District-wide rollouts usually run two to four weeks by choice—time spent tuning grade-band policies, briefing staff, and extending coverage to take-home devices—rather than because anything technical takes that long.
Can teachers request an exception, or does everything go through IT?
Both, and you decide the balance. An administrator can grant a per-site exception for one group in seconds, and districts that want to lighten the help desk can delegate a limited approval role to building staff. Either way every exception is scoped and logged, so opening one site for a chemistry class never quietly opens it district-wide.
What does the student see when a page is blocked?
A clear block notice rather than a broken or confusing error—it names the category that triggered the block and, where you enable it, offers a path to request access. Explainable blocks cut the “the internet is broken” tickets, and they let a teacher or librarian answer a student on the spot instead of filing a ticket to find out why.
Do we still need an acceptable use policy and student lessons if we have the filter?
Yes. CIPA pairs the technology protection measure with an internet safety policy and education on appropriate online behavior and cyberbullying awareness—the filter is the enforcement layer, not the whole obligation. We supply the filtering and the records; your internet safety policy, acceptable use policy and classroom lessons complete the certification. Our guides on the internet safety policy and acceptable use policy give you a starting template.

See your district through the filter’s eyes

Bring your top student-visited sites to a 30-minute demo and watch how category policy, the AI blocklist and off-campus enforcement would handle them—then get a quote sized to your enrollment.