Adding Google Adsense Ads.txt to Squarespace
If you’re here, your probably having the same problem I was having recently, trying to get the Ads.txt file to work with Squarespace. I had done what many online guides had asked, over and over, and each time I’d still be stuck with that annoying “Fix Now” banner within Adsense, telling me that my revenue was “at risk”.
So if you’re looking for help - then here it is!
First of all, you’ll need to log in to your Adsense account. If the “Fix Now” banner is showing, click that - otherwise, click Sites.
Click on the Down arrow on the relevant domain, and then click Download where it states to “Create an ads.txt file”.
Once you’ve downloaded this, you’ll need to upload it to your Squarespace site - and this is where things were going a little wrong for me. To do this, I’d recommend doing it on the home page of your site (don’t worry, it’s only gonna show there temporarily).
In a Text box, write Ads.txt and highlight it as though you are going to create a link - but in the link screen, at the side you can change this to “File”.
Upload the ads.txt file you previously downloaded from Adsense.
This will now likely be linked as [yourdomain]/s/ads.txt - you can right-click this to copy the link, just to be sure. Save this text box and save the changes to the page.
Now, go into Settings, then Advanced, before clicking URL Mappings. In here, you want to paste the location of that file you just copied, but removing your domain so all that’s left is the /s/ads.txt part.
Next, you want to add “/ads.txt ->” before this, and “301” after, so it should look like: /ads.txt -> /s/ads.txt 301 Basically, you want Squarespace to permanently redirect /ads.txt at the end of your domain to the file in question (this way it can be picked up by Google).
Once that’s done, save your changes and open a new tab to check it worked - input your domain, with /ads.txt at the end - if it pops up with a window to download the ads.txt file, then we’re all good.
Finally, since you probably don’t want the randomly linked file showing on your site, you can go back and delete the text we linked right back at the start - the file will still be there in the background so don’t worry. (And if you’re a worrier like me, then feel free to check again as per the previous point).
That’s you all done! Within 24-48 hours, this should be picked up by Google and the pesky “Fix Now” banner should disappear. Google does warn that it can take up to a month for quieter sites, but mine was all sorted within a day.
I really hope that helped, and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!
- V x
