Privacy · Plain-English answer
No. With a VPN connected, your ISP cannot see the websites you visit, your searches, or the content of your traffic. It can only see that you are sending encrypted data to a VPN server, how much, and when. Your browsing history stays between you and the VPN tunnel.
On a normal connection, your ISP sees every domain you visit through your DNS queries and connection records, even when the pages themselves are encrypted with HTTPS. In some countries ISPs are required to retain this metadata, and in others they are permitted to use or sell it for advertising.
That visibility is the main thing a VPN removes. Once the tunnel is up, all your ISP observes is an encrypted stream between you and one server.
Honesty requires the caveats. Your ISP knows you are using a VPN, because the connection pattern is recognisable. It can see total data volumes and the times you are online, so heavy late-night traffic is visible as volume even though its content is not. None of that reveals sites or pages.
The protection also depends on your DNS queries actually going through the tunnel. A misconfigured setup can leak them to the ISP anyway, which is worth ruling out with the test at /tools/dns-leak-test/. ROOT VPN routes DNS inside the tunnel and keeps no activity logs itself.
ROOT VPN is free to start with unlimited data, no card needed, and no activity logs.
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