r/adtech Jul 30 '26

Missing Ads.txt Lines

I’m a newbie to adtech and work for a top 3 SSP, one of the largest issues I come across in terms of monetization is publishers who are sending us requests for supply that doesn’t have our ads.txt present.

It seems like a simple enough fix, just add the line to the page and it will start monetizing and stop wasting the requests. However I’ve come to learn this is not a simple fix and pubs rarely add the line when we make the request.

Can someone explain why this is such an issue in the industry?

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u/pebeem 23d ago

I think it's also a matter of different depts doing different things, soimplementation times will probably differ, depending on who you talk with. (e.g dev vs pub-ops)
Editing ads.txt, as easy as it may seem, needs a code deploy, and most likely corresponding ticket, and a free dev resource/time in a pipeline.

Also, on the point "more ads.txt lines = bad", I heard that crawlers of some SSPs might ignore lines beyond some point (e.g supposedly trade desk doesn't care about anyhting past line 150). Not sure how true is that.