Ads.txt

What is ads.txt?

Ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers and is a text file that allows web publishers to publicly declare who is authorized to sell their digital inventory.

This creates greater transparency in the inventory supply chain, and gives publishers control over who sells their inventory, making it harder for fraudulent actors to profit from selling counterfeit inventory.

After the success of the ads.txt initiative, the Interactive Advertising Bureau brought it to mobile. Learn more about app-ads.txt.

Ads.txt example

Each domain publishes ads.txt on their web server and lists exchanges and advertisers that are authorized to sell their inventory, including the publisher’s seller account IDs within each of those advertisers. http://yourdomain.com/ads.txt: #,,,

Authorizedseller1.com, 12345, DIRECT, AEC242

Authorizedseller2.com, 6789, DIRECT

Authorizedseller3.com, 7462, RESELLER

How to use ads.txt with AdSense

Google’s Adsense gives these instructions:

Sign in to your AdSense account

If you haven’t integrated it already, you’ll have an alert on your homepage. Click on Fix now

Open the “Create an ads.txt file for…” message

Click Download

Upload the file to the root level of your site

How to use ads.txt with Wordpress

First, you need to install and activate the Ads.txt Manager plugin. Upon activation, click on settings, then on the ads.txt page to configure the plugin settings. The plugin provides you with a text area where you can add lines to declare each authorized platform or reseller. After installing the plugin, you’ll have a text area where you can add lines to declare each individual platform or reseller that is authorized. For example, you can add the following line to declare Google Adsense as authorized. Keep in mind that pub-0000000000000000 needs to be replaced with your own publisher ID: google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0