Introduction
If you went through the process to put Google Adsense on your Squarespace website only to be greeted with a message in Google Adsense that your earnings are at risk because you don’t have an ads.txt file on your site, don’t panic. The primary purpose of putting an ads.txt file on your Squarespace website is to help prevent domain spoofing where other people can sell ads that will run on your website without your permission. However, there are some advertisers that won’t run ads on sites that don’t have an ads.txt file, which limits the pool of advertisers available to run on your Squarespace site, which ultimately limits the number of ads available for your site. While it’s not intuitive to put an ads.txt file on your Squarespace website, it is possible. Be aware that after putting the ads.txt file on your Squarespace website, it may take up to a few weeks for Google to crawl your website, find the ads.txt file, and remove the message you see in Google Adsense that your earnings are at risk.
Some of the images associated with the steps are included inline below. All images associated with these steps can be seen in the embedded YouTube video. Also, please note that you’re not able to leave a comment directly on this article. If you have a question or feedback, please leave it on the YouTube video.
Steps to Add Ads.txt to Squarespace Site
- Open a web browser, navigate to google.com/adsense, and then log in to your Google Adsense account. You’ll land on your Google Adsense home screen.
- Click “Fix Now” in the Earnings at Risk message that appears at the top of your Adsense home screen. Information windows will appear on the screen letting you know what you need to fix.
- Locate the section asking you to create an ads.txt file for your site. In this example, my maxdalton.how website is hosted on Squarespace, so we’ll work to get that domain removed from this list. Click “Download” in this section. A Save As dialog box appears on the screen prompting you to save the ads.txt file. Save the file to your specified location.
- Now, navigate to your Squarespace account, and then click “Pages,” and then click to open the top-level page where you want to put your ads.txt file. In this example, I’ll open my About page.
- I’ll hold the cursor over my about section to bring up the menu bar, and then I’ll click “Edit” in the menu bar to make my About section editable. Enter “ads.txt” somewhere in the About section, then highlight that text and click “Link” in the menu bar. The Link dialog box appears. Click the gear icon on the right side of the URL field in the Link dialog box. The Link Editor window appears.
- Choose “File” in the menu on the left side of the window, and then click “Upload File” in the File section on the right side of the window. Navigate to where your ads.txt file is located and then choose to open that file. You’ll now see the ads.txt file in your file list. Click to place a check mark to the left of your ads.txt file in that list, and then click “Save” on the Link Editor screen. Click “Apply” in the Link dialog box on your content screen, and then click “Save” on the page where you put the link. The ads.txt text now links to your ads.txt file.
- Right click the ads.txt link you just created to open a context menu, and then click “Copy Link Address.” Paste the link address into a text file. That link will look something like this.
- Now, navigate back to your Squarespace home screen and click “Settings” to open the Settings screen, and then click “Advanced” in the menu on the Settings screen to open the Advanced screen. Click “URL Mappings” in the menu on the Advanced screen.
- Enter what I have on the screen as the first part of your URL mapping, and then paste in everything after your primary domain in the URL associated with your link that you copied earlier. Leave a space after the end and then enter 301 to signal that this is a redirect. You should have a URL map similar to what I have on the screen. Click “Save” after entering your URL map. You can verify the redirect is working by navigating to your domain, forward slash, ads.txt. When you try to navigate to that, your browser should try to download the ads.txt file.
- After verifying that your Squarespace URL redirect is working, you can remove the link to the ads.txt file from your site if you don’t want to keep it. Don’t panic, this will be fine because the ads.txt file will still be available. You can confirm by navigating back to the URL you previously used to access the ads.txt file, where the web browser should still try to download the file. It may take Google up to a few weeks to crawl your site and pick up your newly added ads.txt file. After that file is picked up, the message about potentially losing revenue will disappear from your Google Adsense home screen for that domain. In this example, you can see that roughly 24 hours after adding the ads.txt file to my maxdalton.how Squarespace site, the file was found by Google and that domain was removed from the list of domains where that was an issue. I also want to add that there are instances where Google does fail to recognize the file after adding it, and you’ll need to go back, delete the ads.txt file and add it again to make sure you’re getting the most out of using Google Adsense on your Squarespace site. If you’re looking for more information on this subject, I’ll link to some great websites you can check out below where this is an ongoing discussion about the challenges associated with putting an ads.txt file at the root level of your Squarespace domain.
