What an AI website blocker is.
A traditional website blocker stores a list and blocks every address on it. That works well for the sites you already know about. It struggles with everything else: the site you’ve never visited, the useful page on a site that’s usually a distraction, and the distraction that isn’t a website at all.
An AI website blocker adds a judgement step. It looks at what you’re doing and compares it with what you said you’d do. FocusDragon’s version, AI Focus, takes a downscaled screenshot of your whole screen at a random moment every 10 to 20 seconds during a block and asks one question: are you distracted from your goal?
Tab checkers and screen checkers.
Most AI blockers are browser extensions that judge each tab’s address or text. They’re simple to install, and they only see the browser. A distraction in a desktop app, a game or a video player is invisible to them.
AI Focus judges the whole screen, with the app name, window title and, in a browser, the web address as context. The screenshot is what decides. That means it treats a game, a chat app and a website the same way: on whether they fit your goal.
What to look for in any AI blocker.
Enforcement: does it nudge, or does it act? AI Focus closes the off-task app or browser and keeps it closed for a cooldown that grows from 2 to 10 minutes. Reopening it early just closes it again. Accuracy safeguards: one wrong call shouldn’t cost you your work. AI Focus needs two off-task checks in a row, a few seconds apart, before it acts.
Resistance to workarounds: AI Focus checks at random moments, keeps no list of always-allowed sites, locks the goal for the block and reads on-screen text as content, never as instructions. Privacy: know where your screen goes. AI Focus sends screenshots through FocusDragon’s server, which never stores them, to an AI model provider under a zero-data-retention agreement, and only during a block.
When a traditional blocker is the better tool.
If you never need a site during work, block it outright. A known distraction doesn’t need an AI judgement every few seconds, and a block list is exact, works offline and costs nothing. FocusDragon’s core blocker is free and covers that, with locks that keep holding even if you quit the app.
Reach for AI Focus when the same tools carry both the work and the detour, or when the distractions keep changing faster than you can list them. Run both together and each does the job it’s best at.