Programming Tutorials

  For a publisher, few notifications trigger immediate anxiety like Raptive's "Earnings at Risk" alert. The specific error—"Ads.txt Not Found"—is particularly frustrating because, for 90% of site owners, the file   is   technically there. You can navigate to   yourdomain.com/ads.txt   in a browser and see the list of authorized sellers. Yet, the crawler fails, and your revenue potential plummets. This is rarely a file upload issue. It is almost always a server configuration issue. When a browser loads  ads.txt , it is forgiving. When a programmatic crawler (like Googlebot or Raptive’s verification bot) requests it, strict adherence to HTTP standards, MIME types, and routing logic is required. If your Nginx or Apache configuration unintentionally routes this request through a CMS (like WordPress), adds incorrect headers, or creates a redirect loop, the verification fails. Here is the technical root cause analysis and the server-level configuration required t...