What I Prepared Before Applying for Google AdSense

Before I applied to Google AdSense for this blog, I didn’t just hit “submit for review.” I read the official help pages first, but more useful than that — I went looking for threads from people whose blogs got rejected, to find out what actually trips people up, not just what’s written neatly in the documentation. Turns out most rejections aren’t about anything dramatic. They’re small things that are easy to miss when a site gets thrown together in a hurry.

Privacy policy, and it’s not a formality

This came up constantly in those rejection threads. AdSense uses third-party cookies to serve personalized ads, so a privacy policy is an absolute requirement, not a nice-to-have. I wrote the page in both languages (this site’s been bilingual from day one), and honestly the content itself isn’t complicated — this is a static site, so there’s almost nothing actually being collected. Just localStorage for a theme preference (dark/light/system). I spelled that out explicitly, plus how to opt out of personalized ads through Google Ads Settings, since a few threads mentioned reviewers specifically checking for that.

Enough content, and deep enough

There’s no official number from Google on the minimum article count. But based on the pattern across those forum threads, the rough consensus is a dozen-plus substantial articles — not ones that are three or four sentences and done. I went back through my older drafts and, honestly, a lot were under 300 words. A few were basically quick notes I’d written in a hurry. So before applying, I spent time rewriting a handful of posts to actually have substance, instead of just padding word count to look longer.

Clear About and Contact pages

This is the signal that’s easy to skip but seems to matter — for both human reviewers and their automated systems, a clear About and Contact page shows there’s an actual person behind the site. Not an anonymous domain, not a content farm full of generic articles with no identity attached.

The technical stuff that was already handled

HTTPS and a consistent navigation structure were already covered, thanks to the Nginx + Let’s Encrypt setup I’d put in place for this site from the start, plus the same nav on every page. So this part didn’t need extra work — just a check that everything was still functioning correctly.

I deliberately skipped ads.txt

That file contains the publisher ID Google only gives out after the account gets approved, so there’s no point adding it before approval. It’s not the same as app-ads.txt, which I added later for an Android app using AdMob — two similarly-named files for two different purposes.

The takeaway ended up less dramatic than I expected going in: most AdSense requirements boil down to “a site run in good faith” — a clear privacy policy, enough genuine content, a transparent identity. No special trick to pass review. Just homework that has to get done one item at a time, and the easiest part to miss turned out to be the smallest one, not the most technical one.