The score you see after scanning a site isn’t pulled from a database — it’s assembled from public signals the site itself broadcasts. Every site that sells advertising through legitimate networks has to declare it. The question is just whether anyone looks.

What actually moves the needle on the score

The biggest single factor isn’t how many networks a site uses — it’s which tier they belong to. A site with Google AdSense and nothing else gets a modest score not because AdSense is bad, but because premium networks like Mediavine and Raptive have entry requirements (typically 50,000+ monthly sessions) that filter out lower-traffic publishers. When you see a Premium or Enterprise result, you’re looking at a site that has already cleared those bars.

The ads.txt file adds 20 points because its absence is genuinely informative. Sites that skip it are either very new, operating outside the standard programmatic ecosystem, or not serious about their ad revenue. All three cases tell you something. Publisher IDs found inside ads.txt or AdSense scripts aren’t a privacy concern when they show up in a scan — they’re intentionally public, since that’s exactly how ad exchanges verify a site is authorized to sell its own inventory; any site running Google AdSense has this ID visible to anyone who looks at the page source. When a network in the results grid shows “Found in: ads.txt, page source,” that’s a double confirmation — the signal was detected both in the formal ads.txt declaration and in the page’s HTML or scripts. A network listed with only “page source” means the script is present but the site hasn’t formally declared that partnership in ads.txt.

The gap between “running ads” and “making money from ads”

A site can have an AdSense tag in its HTML and earn almost nothing — a few dollars a month on low-traffic topics. Another site with the same setup earns thousands because it gets traffic in a high-value niche like finance or health. The score doesn’t capture niche or traffic volume, because that data isn’t public. What it captures is the sophistication of the monetization setup — which correlates with, but doesn’t directly measure, actual revenue.

This is why the result says “Premium ad stack detected” rather than claiming a specific income figure. The stack is verifiable. The income isn’t.

What the checker doesn’t see

Some monetization is invisible from outside: direct sponsorships negotiated privately, affiliate links without network scripts, newsletter revenue, paid subscriptions, or ad setups loaded dynamically after the initial page render. A site with a score of 0 might still earn significantly — it just earns in ways that don’t leave traces in ads.txt or page source. The same blind spot explains a site that shows “Not Monetized” despite ads being visibly present when you look at it yourself: some networks load entirely through iframes or after JavaScript events the scanner doesn’t trigger, so a low score there usually means the network isn’t yet in the signal library, or the ads are loaded through a tag manager in a way that hides the original source — not that the site is actually unmonetized.

Sites that aggressively lazy-load their ad scripts may also show fewer detected networks than they actually use. The confidence percentage reflects how much signal was actually available to analyze. Results are also cached for 10 minutes, so checking the same site twice in quick succession can occasionally surface a slightly different page state once that cache expires — some sites A/B test their ad configuration or rotate which scripts load when.