See who is really selling your inventory

A plain-text file a publisher puts at /ads.txt listing every exchange account authorized to sell its inventory. Each line names an exchange, an account ID at that exchange, and whether the relationship is DIRECT or RESELLER. A buyer can check it to confirm the inventory they are bidding on is genuinely the publisher's to sell.

The other half of the same picture, published by exchanges rather than publishers. It declares who each account ID actually belongs to, and whether that seller is a PUBLISHER, an INTERMEDIARY (a reseller) or BOTH. Where ads.txt says who is authorized, sellers.json says who they are.

DIRECT means the publisher is paid by that exchange directly. RESELLER means someone else sits in between. Neither is wrong, but a line quietly changing from DIRECT to RESELLER means the money path changed — which is exactly the kind of thing worth being told about.

A company that resells other people's inventory. They appear in an exchange's sellers.json declared as INTERMEDIARY or BOTH. Every intermediary in a chain is another hop between the publisher and the buyer, and another place for the two files to disagree.

sellers.json files are re-checked daily. Publisher ads.txt files are checked weekly, or daily once someone is monitoring them. Re-checks use conditional requests, so an unchanged file costs one cheap round trip and the full parse only runs when something actually moved.

Yes, and no account is needed. What a free lookup shows is the current state of a file. What is sold is continuity — being told when it changes again, monitoring across many domains at once, and API access.

No. We keep the current version of each file and re-check it on a schedule. When something changes you are alerted at that moment; we do not retain an archive of previous versions, and unwatched domains that publish nothing are not re-crawled at all.