Verifying your site with ads.txt

One line in a text file on your domain tells the industry that eFind is authorized to sell your inventory.

ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers) is an industry standard from the IAB Tech Lab. A site owner publishes a small text file at the root of their domain listing every advertising system allowed to sell ads on that site. Buyers check it, and so do we.

Adding eFind to your ads.txt is optional today, but it proves you control the domain you registered with us, and it is the first thing we look at when reviewing a site.

Your line

Every publisher account has one seller ID. You'll find it, and the exact line to paste, at the top of My sites. It looks like this:

ads.efind.com, a1b2c3d4e5f60718, DIRECT

Use the same line on every site in your account. The ID is per account, not per site.

Install it

1. If your site already has an ads.txt file, open it. If not, create a plain text file named ads.txt.
2. Add your line from My sites on its own line. Order doesn't matter.
3. Upload it to the root of your domain so it is reachable at https://yourdomain.com/ads.txt. Not a subfolder, not a subdomain.
4. Open that URL in a browser and confirm you see the file as plain text.
5. Back on My sites, open the site and click Check now.

If you use WordPress, most hosts let you upload to the site root through their file manager or FTP. Several plugins will also manage the file for you. If you use a site builder like Squarespace, Wix or Shopify, look for an "ads.txt" setting; each of them has one.

What the status means

• Verified - we fetched your ads.txt and found your line. Nothing more to do.
• Not listed - the file exists but your line isn't in it, or it has a different seller ID. Double-check the ID and that you saved the right file.
• No file - there's no ads.txt at the root of your domain yet (404), or the server returned a web page instead of a text file.
• Error - we couldn't reach your site, the file was too large, or the site URL on your profile doesn't point at a real domain. The note under the status says which.
• Not checked - we haven't crawled this site yet. We check every site nightly, or click Check now.

Things that trip people up

• www vs. root - we fetch from the root domain (example.com/ads.txt). If your site lives on www.example.com, make sure the root redirects to it, or put the file in both places.
• Soft 404s - some hosts serve a pretty "page not found" page with a 200 status. To us that's an HTML page, not an ads.txt file. Check the URL in a private window.
• Caching / CDNs - if you just uploaded the file and we still say No file, your CDN may be serving the old response. Purge it and try again.
• Typos - the three fields are separated by commas. DIRECT is the right relationship for a site you own. RESELLER is for sites you sell on behalf of someone else.

Does this affect my earnings?

Not right now. Verification status is informational. We're collecting it so that, when ads.txt becomes part of site review, nobody gets surprised - you'll see exactly where you stand on My sites long before then.

Checking it yourself

Open https://yourdomain.com/ads.txt in a browser. If you see your line, you're done. Our crawler fetches the same URL once a night, identifying itself as eFindAds-adstxt, and tries both https and http.