How come Google AdSense is not detecting my ads.txt file? 📁

tl;dr Needs a route.

AdSense 🪧

✅ You've signed up for AdSense
✅ AdSense has approved your site
❌ AdSense is not detecting your ads.txt file

Showing my Age 💽

The AdSense instructions state to put the ads.txt file in the root of your sites filesystem. So, me thinking of the old bare metal 🤘 days puts it there, but AdSense can't find it. Well the bare metal days are gone and this is a flask app, in Docker containers, behind a proxy, and a load balancer; phew 😅.

Create a Route ⨒

The solution is to create a route in your flask app that serves the ads.txt file.

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@app.route("/ads.txt")
def serve_ads_txt():
    return send_from_directory(app.static_folder, 'ads.txt')

Then place the ads.txt file in the static/ directory of your flask app.

Success 🎊

Now AdSense can find the ads.txt ✅. Once you know you know. Have fun out there on the internet folks. 🕸️