You must have worked hard to get your site approved by Google for Adsense monetization. Now this hard work should not go in vain. If your Adsense account is showing ‘Earnings at risk’ error, then it can severely impact your revenue. In this post, I will share my experience with this error and suggest a way to solve it.
Adsense Earnings at Risk Error
My Adsense account was going fine. One day I opened the account and found an error message ‘Earnings at risk – You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue’. I realized that the error may be due to updation of WordPress which may delete an existing ads.txt file. It is good practice to regular check your Adense account for error and keep a copy of last functioning ads.txt file.
Steps to Solve the Problem
I will now list down the steps I followed to rectify the error. I request you to repeat the same in the order.
Step 1 – Click on fix now
With the error message, a blue color link ‘fix now’ will appear as shown below. Click on that to move ahead.
Step 2 – Download Ads.txt File
Google will automatically create one ads.txt file for you and will request to upload it to the root level domain of your site. Click on ‘DOWNLOAD’ button to get your ads.txt file.
A snippet of my ads.txt is shown below. Now you will get an idea of what this file is about. It lists down ad networks from whom you will display ads on your site. This mechanism has been brought to bring transparency for the people putting their money for ads on your site. This means, the file should be accessible to all from your domain.
Step 3 – Upload Ads.txt File to Root Domain
Now you have to login to your hosting account. I am having my hosting from Bluehost. So, I will provide steps on Bluehost to upload the file. The steps won’t differ much if you have other hosting provider.
- Login to Bluehost account and click on ‘File Manager’.
- File Manager will show the contents of your WordPress site. A snippet is shown below. Click on ‘public_html’ folder on left-side of view. This folder contains public accessible content of your site.
- Click on upload button in order to upload ads.txt file to public_html folder.
- Now upload the ads.txt file following the instructions as per snippet below.
Step 4 – Verify Upload
I have earlier mentioned that ads.txt should be publicly accessible. In order to verify proper upload, open browser and visit the page http://your-domain-name/ads.txt. The result in case of my website can be checked at https://www.sancheya.com/ads.txt. It is to be noted that the file should be accessible with both http as well as https.
After successfully uploading ads.txt file, Google may take few days to discover the change. Till then, the error won’t go away. If you like to have resolution of error in one day, then follow the next few steps.
Step 5 – Visit Google Search Console
Login into Google search console with the same gmail account as of your Adsense account. If you are new to Search console, then add your website to it with simple steps to follow up. Once done, click on URL inspection link and provide your ads.txt path to it. Google will mention that ‘URL is not on Google’. In that case, click on request indexing to request Google to index the page.
Google won’t crawl or index the page immediately but will put the page in a priority queue for indexing. Till the indexing is not done, the status as shown below will be reflected.
After crawling done by Google, which may take few hours to a day, the below status will be reflected by URL inspection.
Now, check your Adsense account after one day. You will happy to find out the error message to be gone.
Summary
In this post, I have shared a workable method to rectify Adsense error ‘Earnings at risk’. I have provided steps to upload ads.txt file under right folder of WordPress. I have also mentioned quick step to index the ads.txt file on Google.
If you’ve any query, suggestion or feedback on the topic, then please leave a reply below. I will be more than happy to answer your questions.
If the article has helped you in some way or other, then you can donate in order to support the website. Have a nice day!
My account earnings showed $ 2 at the top today .. but $ 4 at the bottom .. twice as much .. then the estimated earnings are all right .. but only the earnings shown on the website below are wrong .. I do not know what the problem is. Please help
Hi Thiru,
I have observed that there is some minor adjustment happen in earnings as Google takes into account all the background data regarding a user visit, click, etc. Many times, this updation happens taking some time by Google.
I have been trying to solve this dreaded ads.txt issue for many weeks now, and stumbled upon this article. I am hoping using search console can speed up the process by which Google finds my ads.txt file! I have requested indexing for https with and without www and http with and without www – four requests in total. I am not sure if having all 4 in search console is necessary but google apparently only has 1/4 of the ads.txt in their index, so who knows! thank you!
Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!
Welcome
Very helpful Post, I also tried to write some career guidelines in my new blog here…
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Glad to hear that you found the post to be helpful. Thanks for your appreciation.
I have no ads on site, I HAVE ads.txt notification saying my code is not implemented, but You can see that is implemented correctly.
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One day disappears than comes back without making any changes. It`s like this since September last year. Please Help me!
Thank you so much for providing this!! I could not figure out how to do this for the life of me until I ran across this page. Thanks again!
You are welcome.