There is something NQR at Google that it continually incorrectly reports sites missing it’s ads.txt file when it is clearly there. We’ve waited and waited (months) on busy active websites, seeing “Earning at risk” message, sometimes it disappears only to re-appear.
On each occassion we have checked, the ads.txt file is clearly there, in the correct location (public_html – root). See below for two examples.
Google has a help page and a Troubleshooting ads.txt issues page but it has not helped.
3 issues and fixes
- Your site doesn’t have an ads.txt file – download and add it
- Your publisher ID is missing from your ads.txt file. – Copy your publisher ID and add it to your ads.txt file
- You’ve uploaded your ads.txt but AdSense still says you need to create one. – Please wait a few days (up to a month).
To verify that you published your file correctly, check access the ads.txt URL (https://example.com/ads.txt) in your web browser.
Missing Google ads.txt file
Earnings at risk – You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue.
Create an ads.txt file for 2 sites
To prevent severe impact on revenue, download an ads.txt file then upload the file to the root level domain of each site:
It may take a few days for changes to update. If you’re using another ad network, remember to add the network to the ads.txt file. See the ads.txt guide for more details.
FIX – MISSING ADS.TXT FILE
In July 2020, we discovered Google detects the ads.txt file in the root without www.
The root of all of our websites is: https://www.example.com/ads.txt (not https://example.com/ads.txt as the Google example).
We added this code to the .htaccess file of the offending websites and a few days later the count went from 17 missing files to 0. The code redirects the user from without www to with wwww.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] Download the code
- code-htaccess-rewrite (Notepad)