I deployed three independent directory sites to Vercel last month and tried to add Google AdSense to all three. Every application got rejected. The rejection email cited "site not yet ready" — vague enough that I assumed it was a content quality issue. After three rounds of revising the sites and re-applying, I figured out it wasn't about content at all. It was about the URL.
AdSense will not approve a *.vercel.app site. Not because of programmatic content, not because of site age, not because of low traffic. Because the domain is not yours.
How AdSense decides what counts as your site
Google's AdSense terms require the applicant to "own or have control of" the site they want to monetize. When you deploy to Vercel, your URL is your-project.vercel.app — a subdomain of vercel.app, which is owned and controlled by Vercel. From the AdSense automated review perspective, you are asking permission to display ads on a domain that legally belongs to someone else.
This isn't published as a hard rule anywhere I can find. There's no FAQ entry that says "subdomains of platform providers are not eligible." The signal you get is a generic rejection that points at content. But the pattern is consistent across reports I dug up afterward: Vercel subdomains, Netlify subdomains, GitHub Pages *.github.io without a custom domain, Replit, render.com — all hit the same wall.
I confirmed this by searching for other indie developers who deployed to Vercel subdomains and applied for AdSense. The same rejection comes back every time. In every public case I could find, the fix was the same: add a custom domain. After the domain change, AdSense applications either approved cleanly or moved to the next stage of review.
The frustrating part is that the rejection message implies you should improve the content. I spent two weeks rewriting category pages, adding original analysis, polishing the about/contact pages — none of which mattered, because the application never actually reached the content review stage.
The other wall: scaled content abuse
If your site is also programmatic — generating pages from a data pipeline, like mine — you have a second filter to clear after the domain one. Google's March 2024 spam update added "scaled content abuse" as an explicit policy. Sites with templated, machine-generated pages at scale can be deindexed or refused monetization even after they pass the domain ownership check.
I'm not certain my sites would clear this filter even on a custom domain. The directory format I'm running — AI tool listings, "alternative to" comparisons, "games like X" recommendations — is genuinely curated against external data sources (HuggingFace, GitHub stars, Steam metadata), but the page structure is undeniably template-driven. The pages have a generated feel even with the human-style introductions Claude Haiku writes for each entry.
The honest answer is I won't know until I get past the first wall and try the application again on a real domain. What I do know: skipping the domain step makes the question moot. You can't fail a filter you never reach.
The math I almost got wrong
A .com domain at Cloudflare Registrar costs $9.15 per year. Three domains for three sites: $27.45 per year. I was treating that as an expense to optimize away. The reasoning was "if these sites don't generate traction, I will have wasted $27." That framing was wrong on two counts.
First, Vercel subdomains foreclose every major ad network — not just AdSense. Mediavine, Ezoic, Media.net, Raptive: all of them either explicitly require a custom domain or fail their automated checks against subdomain URLs. Without one, the entire ad-revenue ceiling is zero, regardless of how much traffic the site eventually gets. The $27 isn't insurance against waste; it's the access fee to a category of revenue that simply doesn't exist otherwise.
Second, this is meant to be a sellable asset. The plan from day one was to operate the three sites for 6–12 months and then list them on a marketplace like Flippa or Empire Flippers. A *.vercel.app subdomain is not transferable to a buyer in any practical sense. The buyer would need to relaunch the site under their own domain, breaking every backlink and search ranking accumulated. Indie acquisition marketplaces explicitly call this out — sites on platform subdomains list at deep discounts or get filtered out of search entirely. Skipping the $9 domain destroys the resale value far more than the ad revenue loss.
I caught this before launch was old enough to matter, which was the only thing that saved me from a much worse outcome. If I had run the experiment for six months and then realized at sale time, the $27 saved would have cost me five figures.
What I'm doing now
Three .com domains via Cloudflare Registrar, total $27.45 per year. Cloudflare sells at registry cost with no markup, which makes it the cheapest legitimate registrar I've found for .com. The sites already have permanent (308) redirects from the old *.vercel.app URLs configured in vercel.json, so any indexing accumulated during the subdomain period stays intact and inherits to the new domain.
The AdSense application will be re-submitted after DNS propagation completes — probably a week of waiting before anything moves. If it still gets rejected on the programmatic content grounds, the fallback is Amazon Associates plus SaaS affiliate networks like PartnerStack and Impact, which were already running and accept Vercel subdomains. Those have been carrying the monetization load this whole time. The diversification turned out to be load-bearing in a way I didn't plan for.
I'm not optimistic that AdSense will approve directory sites with my level of automation, even on custom domains. The honest expectation is that the affiliate networks will end up being primary, with AdSense as a possibly-permanent reject. But the experiment requires actually testing the domain hypothesis cleanly, which means paying the $27.
What would have saved me a month
A single sentence in the Vercel docs along the lines of "Note: most major ad networks, including Google AdSense, require a custom domain — plan for $10 per year per site if monetization is a goal" would have changed my entire month one strategy. The information exists in scattered Reddit threads and indie hacker Discord servers, but nothing authoritative ties it together.
If you are building any kind of ad-supported site on Vercel — content site, directory, blog, anything monetizable — buy the domain on day one. The $9 you save by skipping it is not actually money you save. It is monetization you postpone, and resale value you destroy. I learned this the slow way so you don't have to.
Part of an ongoing 6-month experiment running three AI-curated directory sites. The technical claims here are real; this article was AI-assisted.
