Site approval

Site down or unavailable

Your site loads fine when you open it. That is usually the point: it loaded for you, on your network, in your browser. The review was done by a machine that is none of those things.

By Mario Bailey · Published October 8, 2026

Site down or unavailable is the reason publishers report seeing in AdSense when a site is not approved, and it is a reachability result, not a content verdict: the review could not get a usable page from your site. Google's help center does not use this wording anywhere we could find. The closest thing it documents is one of its four reasons a site is not ready to show ads, "Your site is unreachable," in its article on sites that are not ready to show ads. That section and Google's page on fixing AdSense crawler issues are what everything below is built on.

What the crawler needed

AdSense has its own crawler, separate from the one behind Google Search. It is called Mediapartners-Google, and Google adds that AdSense "also uses a crawler called Google-Display-Ads-Bot to verify your site when you add a site to AdSense." Google is explicit that "The AdSense crawler is different from the Google crawler."

Google's unreachable checklist asks five things. Did you add the correct URL? Is the site published and live? Can AdSense reach it without a password? Is the crawler blocked in robots.txt? And if you use HTTPS, is the certificate valid and from a recognized authority (not self-signed), with HTTP redirecting to HTTPS? Its account setup page states the stakes: "If your site is under construction, doesn't load, or is difficult to navigate, we can't set up your account."

What it is not

It is not a judgment on your writing. Content problems get their own verdicts, such as low value content. Rewriting articles will not help a crawler that never saw them.

It is not necessarily a real outage either. Your own browser on your own connection is the least representative test there is. A security rule can serve you a normal page and serve the crawler a 403, a challenge page, or nothing at all.

And a clean bill of health from Google Search does not settle it. Google's crawler documentation says the special-case crawlers, which include Mediapartners-Google, "operate from a different IP range than the common crawlers" such as Googlebot. A firewall allowlist built for Googlebot can still shut the ads crawler out.

The real causes, and how to test each

Work through these in order, from outside your own network (a phone on mobile data is enough), because your own connection may be allowlisted, cached, or logged in. Replace example.com with your domain.

The server really was down, slow, or overloaded. Google lists this as a hosting issue: the server "is unable to respond in time" because it is "down, slow or overloaded by requests." Check your uptime monitor and your host's status page for the days around the review, then fetch the headers from outside:
```
curl -sI https://example.com/
```
You want a 200 status back within a second or two. If the host is slow or flaky, the fix is hosting, not another submission.
The URL in AdSense is not the one that works. Google's first question is whether you provided the correct URL, and its crawler notes say it "will access site.com and www.site.com separately." If you added example.com but only www.example.com is set up (or the reverse), the crawler can land on a host that errors. Test both:
```
curl -sIL http://example.com/
curl -sIL http://www.example.com/
```
Each should end at a 200 on your one canonical host, in one or two hops. If the URL in AdSense is simply wrong, Google's fix is to remove that site and add a new one with the correct URL.
DNS does not resolve everywhere. Google's hosting checks ask whether your name server is "properly directing the ads crawler to your content."
```
dig +short example.com @8.8.8.8
dig +short www.example.com @1.1.1.1
```
Every answer should point at your current host. A recent nameserver move, a missing www record, or a stale IPv6 (AAAA) record aimed at an old server are common culprits.
robots.txt shuts the AdSense crawler out. Open https://example.com/robots.txt in a browser. Google's fix is to remove a User-agent: Mediapartners-Google group that says Disallow: /, and you should check for one naming Google-Display-Ads-Bot too. A blanket User-agent: * block is a different matter: Google's crawler reference says that for Mediapartners-Google "The global user agent (*) is ignored." Remove a leftover staging block anyway, because Googlebot does obey it.
A firewall, bot challenge, or country block stops it. Google lists both: content "behind a restricted network or IP range," and an ads crawler blocked "via a web application firewall." This is how a site can be up for everyone else and still unreachable for the review. CDN bot protection, challenge modes, host-level bot blocking, and country blocks all qualify. Test from outside:
```
curl -sI -A "Mediapartners-Google" https://example.com/
```
If that returns a 403, 429, 503, or a challenge page while the same request without -A succeeds, a rule keys on that user agent. It may be a fake-bot filter that would still admit the real crawler, and a 200 does not clear you either, because many firewalls judge bots by IP. Either way the answer is in your firewall or CDN event log: look for blocked requests from Mediapartners-Google or Google-Display-Ads-Bot. To let them in safely, match on Google's published special-crawler IP ranges or reverse DNS, not on the user agent string, which anyone can fake.
A login wall, staging lock, or maintenance mode. Google asks whether AdSense can reach the site "without a password," and suggests temporarily removing the login if not; a crawler login only becomes available after your account is activated. Coming-soon plugins, maintenance modes, and password protection on a preview host all count. Open the site in a private window, logged out. If curl -sI returns 401, 403, or 503, the crawler sees the same.
HTTPS errors or a redirect loop. Beyond a valid certificate and an HTTP to HTTPS redirect, Google warns that with redirects "there's a risk that the ads crawler might have issues following through them." curl -sI http://example.com/ should show a single 301 to the https address. curl refuses an expired, self-signed, or mismatched certificate unless you pass -k, so an error there is a real finding. If curl -sIL stops with Maximum (50) redirects followed, you have a loop, often a CDN's HTTPS setting fighting the origin's.
Check what Google Search can see. In Search Console, run URL Inspection on your homepage and click Live Test. A failed fetch or a robots.txt block there is decisive. A pass is only partial evidence: Google says the live test "only confirms if Google-InspectionTool can access your page," it follows redirects without showing them, and Google notes that the Search Console crawler is separate from the AdSense one.

How to request review again

Fix the cause, confirm the fix from outside your network, then submit once. Google's steps:

Sign in to AdSense and click Sites.
Click the site that needs review.
Confirm the AdSense code is on the site, then click Next.
Click Request review.

Google says the review "usually takes a few days, but in some cases can take 2-4 weeks." While the site shows Getting ready, leave it alone: Google's status article warns that removing the site and resubmitting it can delay the process. If the next result names a different reason, the crawler most likely got in this time and is now judging the site itself. See Needs attention and our index of every AdSense message by name.

Quick outside checks

Our free readiness check fetches your homepage from outside your network, tests HTTPS, and reads your robots.txt for rules aimed at the AdSense crawler. The site scan adds ads.txt and page-health checks. Neither can request your site from Google's IP ranges, so a firewall rule that singles out Google will only show up in your own logs.

The calm version of the lesson: security that blocks every machine it does not recognize also blocks the one machine that pays you. Let the ads crawler in on purpose, by Google's published ranges, and keep the rest of your protection.

Run the readiness check Scan your site

Sources: Google, What to do when your site is not ready to show ads; Fix AdSense crawler issues; About the AdSense ads crawler; List of Google's special-case crawlers. Quotations are Google's. Current as of October 2026.