At Google, we’re always committed to protecting the safety of your app revenue. A key challenge faced by apps is inventory fraud from bad actors. To help publishers combat this challenge, we’re getting ready to support and enforce app-ads.txt across our ads systems to ensure advertiser spend reaches the intended publisher.
What is app-ads.txt? App-ads.txt is an extension of the original ads.txt standard which provides a mechanism for web publishers to declare their authorized digital sellers. It is intended to protect app publishers from inventory spoofing from fraudsters. What is changing and what does it mean to you?
We are excited to announce that AdMob will be supporting and enforcing app-ads.txt for publishers who have published an app-ads.txt file to their developer domain starting on 2019-08-27. To prepare for this change, please make sure the published app-ads.txt file on your developer’s domain does not contain any errors or typos.
How can you ensure your app-ads.txt file is implemented correctly? If your file contains any errors or typos, your ad serving will be at risk of getting blocked because any files published will be regarded as the source of truth for enforcement. So it is extremely important to have correct implementation and resolve any errors before 2019-08-27, or the file will need to be unpublished from your domain to avoid unintentional revenue loss.
For publishers working with Google products, your app-ads.txt files should contain lines in the following format. It should always use google.com as the domain name and you should replace the publisher ID with your ID. Here is a sample line: google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, #Google Admob Team#
