Cliqz is shutting down its anti-tracking browser and search engine but says it will keep Ghostery subsidiary running
Yesterday we've announced with a heavy heart the Cliqz story is over. Tweets: @cliqz : Yesterday we've announced the end of Cliqz and our hearts are still heavy. We hope someone continues this important fight for digital independence. But for now: Thanks for believing in something that was unlikely from the beginning, but worth believing in. https://cliqz.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Cliqz spent years assembling an independence stack: the Mozilla-backed German company bought Ghostery in 2017 and pushed it beyond blacklist blocking into heuristic, AI-driven script detection, while building its own anti-tracking browser and search engine on top. The shutdown ends the owned browser-and-search bet, but the company is deliberately splitting the stack — killing the access surfaces while keeping the Ghostery subsidiary alive.
That split matters because Ghostery has already been repositioned as a standalone business, with its own CEO in Jean-Paul Schmetz, an open-sourced codebase, and revenue experiments ranging from opt-in deal notifications to paid tracking insights and a $14/month Midnight bundle of ad blocking, tracker protection, monitoring, and VPN.
First-order effects
- Cliqz browser and search engine users lose their products outright, and the company's call for 'someone [to] continue[] this important fight' concedes it found no internal path to keep them running.
- Ghostery survives as the sole operating asset, now carrying the whole group's future on a subscription-and-insights model instead of the parent's browser-and-search strategy.
Second-order effects
- The shutdown created acquisition fodder rather than pure loss: within a year, Brave unveiled its own privacy-focused search engine after acquiring the open-source search engine developed by the team behind Cliqz, so the technology outlived the company inside a rival's product.
- Ghostery's continued operation keeps a tracker-blocking incumbent in the market, forcing competing privacy extensions and browser-native blockers to differentiate against a brand that now sells protection directly at $14/month.
Third-order effects
- The pattern echoes earlier search challengers like Quixey, which raised over $130M and still shut down: standalone alternatives to entrenched default browsers and search engines keep failing commercially even when the underlying technology is good enough to be acquired.
- If the structure holds, privacy tooling consolidates around two viable shapes — features embedded in scaled platforms like Brave's browser-plus-search bundle, and paid standalone subscriptions like Ghostery's — while grant-funded or ad-supported independents exit.
The trend: Independent privacy-first browsers and search engines are proving unsustainable as standalone businesses, with their teams and code absorbed by scaled rivals while ancillary tools survive only through subscription pivots.