IAB's ads.txt initiative is designed to thwart the unauthorized selling of ad inventory and full-on domain spoofing within the RTB programmatic markets. Adoption by publishers and ad tech has rapidly grown recently and the subject has received plenty of industry attention. Major DSPs, including Google’s Double Click Bid Manager, AppNexus, The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and DataXu are reportedly already filtering for ads.txt or will in the near future.

This is a huge step in fighting domain spoofing and unauthorized arbitrage but it can also present a challenge to platforms who will now need to monitor the ads.txt files of thousands of publisher partners and sellers - files that are prone to errors. This is why we've added ads.txt reporting to the Fraudlogix dashboard for RTB impression clients.

The new feature will return results on whether or not the seller is listed within the publisher’s ads.txt file or if the publisher has not implemented ads.txt. It will also allow sellers to monitor their publishing partners to be sure that their ads.txt declaration is correct. From the buy side, DSPs will be able to monitor whether the seller of inventory is declared in a publisher’s ads.txt file.

While we will continue to monitor ad inventory for domain spoofing—in addition to ad fraud, brand safety and viewability—we added the reporting to our dashboard to make the information readily available for our RTB verification clients.

“Our supply-side clients are actively monitoring ads.txt files from their publishing partners — some clients may have thousands of partners — and this is a feature that helps them do that,” said Fraudlogix CEO, Hagai Shechter. “Overall, we want our solution to be a one-stop shop for verification and since the industry has implemented ads.txt we thought it was pertinent to add it to our dashboard, on top of the ad fraud, brand safety, domain spoofing and viewability reporting we do.”