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Your AdSense site says "Requires review" and nothing is happening

MONETIZATION · AdSense

You added your site under Sites in AdSense. The row appeared. Days pass and the status still reads Requires review. Nothing is in progress, no email arrives, and there is no error anywhere telling you why.

Nothing is wrong with your site. The review was never requested.

Adding a site and submitting a site are two different actions

The New site button does exactly one thing: it creates the row. That is the entire effect. The site is now listed, at status "Requires review", and AdSense is doing nothing with it.

Submitting is a separate flow you have to open the site to reach:

  1. Click the site name in the Sites list to open its detail page.
  2. Under Verify site ownership, tick I've placed the code and click Verify. If your AdSense script is already live, this passes immediately.
  3. A confirmation appears. Click Next.
  4. Scroll down. A second panel, Request review, is below the fold on most screens. Click Request review.

Only after that fourth step does the status change.

The one thing to check

The status label is the whole tell, and the wording is unhelpfully similar:

If a site reads "Requires review" more than a few minutes after you added it, it is not in a queue. Go finish the submission.

This is worth auditing right now. On a network of six sites, one had been sitting at "Requires review" for a full day because only the first half of the flow was ever completed. It looked submitted in every summary and screenshot. It was not.

Two smaller traps in the same screen

The Add site dialog loses keyboard focus. If you click New site and start typing without first clicking into the Website field, the text does not go into the dialog. It goes to the page behind it and toggles the status filter chips instead. The dialog stays empty, you click Save, and nothing is created. Click the field, type, and confirm the text is visibly in the box before saving.

Ads.txt showing "Not found" on a site you just added is normal. AdSense has not crawled it yet. Confirm the file yourself before treating it as a defect:

curl -s https://yourdomain.com/ads.txt

If that returns your ads.txt line, you are fine and the status will catch up. If it returns HTML, you have a different and more serious problem, covered in ads.txt not found when the file exists.

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