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Dani 5,664 The Queen of DaniWeb

Hi,

A notification just started showing up in my AdSense that says: Earnings at risk - You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue.

It gives me the ability to download an ads.txt file and upload it to my domain root. Here are the contents of the file it wants me to download:

google.com, pub-8671058606454459, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

and here are the existing contents of my ads.txt, which have been in place now for a very long time:

google.com, pub-8671058606454459, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0
google.com, pub-8671058606454459, RESELLER, f08c47fec0942fa0

What am I doing wrong??

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Dani AI

Generated

A short, practical checklist for — the AdSense alert means Google could not reliably verify the ads.txt served for the domain you added to your account. The ads.txt record itself is simple (ad system, publisher id, relationship, optional cert id), but it only works when the file is reachable at the root of your canonical domain and is served as plain text. Common problems are wrong hostname (www vs non‑www), redirects, the file being blocked by a firewall/security plugin, CDN/host caching, wrong filename/encoding, or the crawler seeing an HTML page instead of a text file. See the official format and placement guidance. (developers.google.com)

Quick steps to check and fix the issue:

  1. Confirm access: open yoursite.com/ads.txt in a browser (try both https/http and with/without www).
  2. Check the HTTP response and headers (for example with curl -I https://yoursite.com/ads.txt) — it should return 200 OK and deliver plain text, not HTML or a download wrapper.
  3. Ensure the file sits in the web root for the exact domain AdSense is tracking (if you use both example.com and www.example.com, make sure the file is present/served correctly for the canonical host).
  4. Remove any accidental redirects to another domain or to an HTML page; some builders require a specific platform workflow to host a root file.
  5. Clear any server/CDN cache and wait — Google may take 24–72 hours (longer for very low-traffic sites) to recheck. (playwire.com)

If the file is reachable and correct but the warning persists after a week, check host/server logs for Googlebot requests to /ads.txt, disable any security plugin momentarily to test, or contact your host for help serving a plain ads.txt at the root. The AdSense “Fix now / Download” line is the authoritative string to include — use it, upload to the exact root, then wait for Google to reverify. (playwire.com)

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