How to Fix “Earnings at risk – One or more of your ads.txt files doesn’t contain your AdSense publisher ID” warning

I woke up one beautiful morning and logged into my Adsense account as usual to see how much I've earned over the night and to my biggest surprise, I saw an error notification about my Ads.txt file and how it will affect my earnings as seen in the screenshot below, the notification goes like this - “Earnings at risk – One or more of your ads.txt files doesn’t contain your AdSense publisher ID. Fix this now to avoid severe impact to your revenue.” 

Well, i thought it's one of those unexpected notifications that Google brings up and will remove later since I haven't made any changes to my Ads.txt file in a very long while. The notification stayed up on my account for days and it keeps pissing me off so I decided to find a solution to it. I tried a few things and at the end of the day, one worked effectively and the error message was removed.

I am sharing this with everyone since so many people also have this same issue as mine and haven't gotten it fixed till now. If you are also faced with this problem, be rest assured this simple post will help you fix it. Note that this is exactly what worked for me and should work for you too. Without wasting time, let's go straight to business.

Procedures

- First, open your browser and type in yoursiteurl.com/ads.txt (where you'll replace yoursiteurl.com with your actual site or blog url) to see if there is any ads.txt on your domain already. For example, stevenbergy.com.ng/ads.txt. After typing it in and pressing enter, if you see something like this  google.com, pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, DIRECT, f08c47fec094xxxx then that means you have ads.txt file on your domain and your Publisher ID is already in the ads.txt file.

- Now, navigate to your Adsense account, click on Settings, then My Sites, a list of all your added sites which can display your Ads will be displayed. Click on the three dots to bring out the menu, then click on Site Authorization and enable Site Authorization by turning on the switch next to it. Switching site authorization on means only the verified websites on your list will be able to display ads with your ad code, this helps protect your earnings and also help prevent clicks from unknown and malicious websites.

- Then, make sure the websites you mark as verified are the websites you own. Any other website present on that list that you do not own should be marked as unverified. In my case, I unmarked the other websites in the screenshot above and ensured only my website is marked as verified. Doing this instantly fixed the error for me since the website that I marked as verified is my own website and it already has a correct ads.txt file attached to it, as explained in the first step.

In summary, make sure the websites marked as verified on your My sites list are your websites, and ensure those websites have a correct Ads.txt file in their domain (refer to the first step to see how a correct Ads.txt file should look like). If a website you do not own is marked as verified in your site list and site authorization is turned off then the error will still be shown because there is no way you're going to add a correct Ads.txt file to the domain of a website you do not own or have access to.

I hope this post is explanatory enough and has helped you fix this issue. If you run into any problem or have questions about this post, please feel free to drop them using the comment box below and don't forget to share this informative post with others. Cheers!