Ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers) is an initiative by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to increase transparency and prevent fraud in programmatic advertising. It is a simple text file that lists the authorized digital sellers for a website, including the publisher ID, seller account ID, and relationship ID.
If you have an Adsense account and are seeing a warning about an incomplete or missing ads.txt file, here are the steps you can take to solve it:
- Create an ads.txt file: Go to the root directory of your website and create a text file named “ads.txt” if it doesn’t already exist.
- Add your publisher ID: In the first line of the ads.txt file, add your Adsense publisher ID. This can be found in your Adsense account under Settings > Account information > Publisher ID.
- Add authorized sellers: In the second line of the ads.txt file, add the name of the authorized seller for your website. For Adsense, this is “google.com”. The complete line should look like this: “google.com, pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0”.
- Save the file: Save the ads.txt file and upload it to the root directory of your website using your preferred method (e.g. FTP, cPanel, etc.).
- Verify the file: You can verify that the ads.txt file has been set up correctly by visiting http://yourdomain.com/ads.txt in a web browser (replace “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name). The file should display your publisher ID and authorized seller.
Once you have set up the ads.txt file correctly, the warning message in your Adsense account should disappear within a few days. It is important to keep your ads.txt file up to date and accurate to ensure that your website is monetized correctly and prevent unauthorized sellers from serving ads on your website.
