First why should setup ads.txt
If you use any advertising on your website, from starting with adsense in the early days to going to a premium adnetwork like Monumetric, Mediavine or Adthrive, you will want to setup the Ads.txt file on your site.
Monumetric has a post on this here: ADS.TXT: Taking Down the Black Market and that title really drew me in. The link opens in a new tab if you want to quickly read it, then come back to the instructions on how you can set it up.
“Ads.txt specifies a mechanism for publishers to list their authorized digital sellers, in order to fight against fraud and misrepresented domains” from https://iabtechlab.com/ads-txt/
You must declare each of authorized ad sellers on your site. If you are using Adsense this will just be your publisher ID from the Adsense settings, but if you are part of another Ad network, you may need to declare additional sellers. See this link from Google for more info.
Instructions to backup WordPress with UpdraftPlus
If you see the warning “Earnings at risk – One or more of your sites does not have an ads.txt file. Fix this now to avoid severe impact to your revenue” in Adsense, it takes up to 24 hours for Google to update for the warning to go away.
If you are on Squarespace and need to setup ads.txt for Adsense, you can try this Reddit post.
If you need to troubleshoot Adsense Ads, I recommend to install the Advanced Ads Plugin, the developer is fairly quick to reply to answer your questions too.
Creating your ads.txt file
If you are using Adsense. Login to your Adsense account and then down on the bottom left, click “Account”. This will open the page that shows you your publisher ID.
There are instructions below for Siteground and Bluehost, most hosts will be fairly similar as you will see between the two here.
Instructions on Siteground
This will open to the File Manager to the root of your domain.
You will be prompted to name your new file
This is from Google’s instructions for Adsense.
Here is the ads.txt from one of our sites.
Instructions on Bluehost
Once inside the File Manager.
This is the root folder for your first site on the host, if you have multiple domains, you may need to click into the subfolder named for your domain.
Enter the following info, using your Publisher ID from the first step above, then click save.
Open your site and add /ads.txt, like this https://example.com/ads.txt
Here is the ads.txt from one of our sites.
You should see your ads.txt file you have created. If you run into trouble or need assistance, feel free to check out my services page and arrange a time for me to assist you with getting this setup.
Check for old sites on Adsense
Check under Adsense sites and confirm all old sites you are no longer using are removed.
If you see an old site, make sure to click the drop-down and remove it.
Test that Google can reach your Ads.txt file
Go to the Old search console Robots.txt tester here, link will open in a new window. Make sure you are logged into your Google Search Console account.
Test to make sure that Google can reach your ads.txt file, especially the last two bots Adsbot-google and MediaPartners-google.
That’s all. Your ads.txt file is setup for adsense. Make sure to check with your ad network for what they want you to use in your ads.txt file if you are with another ad publisher.
Thank you so much for guiding me through this. I appreciate it so much!
I’m so glad you found it helpful.
Thank you so much for helping us with this! I can’t handle anything technical and this was the simplest step-by-step guide I found online!
Hi Sofia, I’m so glad my post was helpful to you.
Great article!
Here is where I am at… Mysite is set up with a www. and I keep getting that error telling me “make sure it can be crawled”
I then came across this in google help, yet I have no idea how to redirect a txt file !?
–Confirm that the file is reachable from the root domain
Redirects from domain.com/ads.txt to http://www.domain.com/ads.txt are fairly common. Ads.txt crawling will start at the root domain, and the root domain needs to return from, or redirect to, the ads.txt file.
An ads.txt file on http://www.domain.com/ads.txt will only be crawled if domain.com/ads.txt redirects to it.
Any help would be great.
Thanks Tara!
Mike
Hi Mike,
What is your domain? I am thinking that may be an htaccess redirect, depending on the host and if this is on WordPress, please feel free to reply with more info and share your domain and I’ll take a look for you.
Thank you
Tara
Thanks so much for this!
Hi Kathaleen, glad you found the post helpful.
awesome! Thanks for the information. I do not like using apps/plugins to do stuff for me that i think i can do manually. Your detailed instruction is really helpful.
Hi Jelly, glad you found the post helpful.
This was one of the most helpful and informative blogs ever!! I was so confused and ready to give up altogether because it seemed so complicated! You made it sound easy. Thank you!
Thank you for this useful information! It saved me a lot of time trying to figure it out