Google AdSense warns publishers to fix Ads.txt or miss out on revenue

Google AdSense announced months ago that it would be making ads.txt compulsory for all users. According to the protocol, the publishers were required to place the ads.txt in each domain. As of now, the company has also started issuing warnings to the user in the form of notifications in AdSense Dashboard, which alerts them that their earnings might be at risk if they don’t fix the ads.txt file issues.

Yes, it is a serious issue to miss out on your earnings. However, the process to fix the ads.txt on advertisements is easy. Simply follow the process below.

What is ads.txt?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Technology Laboratory introduced ads.txt. The method was initiated to aware the advertisers, advertising agencies, and stakeholders about the authorized sellers to whom or for whom they are selling the ads to.

Here are two examples of ads.txt:
https://www.quoteistan.com/ads.txt (Simple)
https://www.adweek.com/ads.txt (More detailed)

How to create the ads.txt?

The format for including the ads.txt file is fairly simple. All you have to do is include all the details about the ad agencies and combine the necessary ad inventory to the .txt file. For example for most Google AdSense publishers the content of ads.txt file will be something like this:

google.com, pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

Google has also shared the details for webmasters with steps to creating the ads.txt file here. Google support page suggests WordPress admins to use a plugin to create a ads.txt file, while for Blogger users it directs them to Blogger.com help center.

When will Google remove the notice?

Google will remove the notice as per its crawler’s potential. This may take anywhere between a few hours to 1 week depending on the publisher of the specific ad.