A few years ago, the advertising industry introduced the ads.txt
project in order to defend against
widespread domain spoofing vulnerabilities in programmatic
advertising.
I decided to use this technology to opt out of having ads sold for my domains, at least through ad exchanges which perform this check, by hosting a text file containing this:
contact=ads@fmarier.org
at the following locations:
(In order to get this to work on my blog, running
Ikiwiki on
Branchable, I had to disable the txt
plugin in order to get ads.txt to be
served as a plain text file instead of being automatically rendered as
HTML.)
Specification
The key parts of the specification for our purposes are:
[3.1] If the server response indicates the resource does not exist (HTTP Status Code 404), the advertising system can assume no declarations exist and that no advertising system is unauthorized to buy and sell ads on the website.
[3.2.1] Some publishers may choose to not authorize any advertising system by publishing an empty ads.txt file, indicating that no advertising system is authorized to buy and sell ads on the website. So that consuming systems properly read and interpret the empty file (differentiating between web servers returning error pages for the /ads.txt URL), at least one properly formatted line must be included which adheres to the format specification described above.
As you can see, the specification sadly ignores
RFC8615 and requires that the
ads.txt file be present directly in the root of your web server, like the
venerable robots.txt file, but unlike the
newer security.txt standard.
If you don't want to provide an email address in your ads.txt file, the
specification recommends using the following line verbatim:
placeholder.example.com, placeholder, DIRECT, placeholder
Validation
A number of online validators exist, but I used the following to double-check my setup: