Prior to moving to Ezoic I had a static ads.txt file on my site with just an adsense line in it:
google.com, pub-2997413406307797, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0
I had previously made a post on how to add an ads.txt file to a Ghost blog by adding the file to your theme. After switching to Ezoic my ads.txt file stopped working, the weird thing is that the validation check on Ezoics site kept stating that everything was OK. I never really checked my actual ads.txt file. I only noticed this because adsense started stating that something was wrong: Earnings at risk – You need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue.:
When going to /ads.txt on my site the page was empty, it seemed like an empty file. To be fair I had not followed any of the guides from Ezoic on how to set up the ads.txt file, since their validator told me everything was OK.
Fixing it
Ezoic has a full guide on how to set this up, below I have written the pieces I used and the end results.
I decided to follow these guides and created an account at AdsTxtManager. After creating an account I added adsense and Ezoic as authorised sellers:
The 1656 entries for Ezoic were populated automatically by Ezoic after a while, the one entry for Google Adsense I added manually in the UI:
After the authorised sellers were set up I copied my Account Id from the profile. This I had to paste into the ads.txt manager setup in Ezoic, located at "Monetization -> ADS.TXT":
It took about 20 minutes before I could find my new /ads.txt page on my site. You can find my new ads.txt file served by Ezoic and AdsTxtManager here. It looks something like the following:
It contains 1.500+ entries so everything is OK and worked out well.
Status on Ezoic and AdTxtManager
One thing to notice is that the status on AdsTxtManager is still "not integrated":
The validation check on Ezoics site is also telling me that my ads.txt is not fully set up:
However I have seen enough ads.txt files to know these are false positives. The real result should be checked by going to /ads.txt on our site. They will likely update in the coming hours. EDIT: 50 minutes after setup, Ezoic validated OK.
That is all
I can only guess why this happened. When getting on board with Ezoic they take over your cloudflare DNS, so they are doing some "magic" on their servers between you and the client request. This way they can handle your /ads.txt page for you. I suggest you let them handle your ads.txt file as they are the experts and know what should be in it, this way you can update your ads.txt file dynamically.
I hope this helps someone else out there :)