I want my blog to earn something. The first step toward that is passing Google AdSense.
But there is a review. And the moment I heard the word “review,” I filled up with worry. What am I supposed to prepare? Will I even get through it? I had no idea, and not knowing was the worst part.
So I brought the whole thing to my AI partner Kuro (Claude), starting from the preparation stage. This is the record of that conversation.
First I asked: “What do I start with?”
I knew the word AdSense. What I did not know was what to actually do about it. So I asked Kuro as plainly as I could: “I want to apply for AdSense. What should I prepare first?”
To make the review easier to pass, let’s get three fixed pages ready first: a privacy policy, a contact page, and a profile page with your operator information. These are the foundation that shows “this is a site that is being run properly.”
What surprised me was the order. Not a word about ads. The starting point was putting the trustworthiness of the site in place.
Once I heard it, though, it made sense. A site where you cannot tell who is writing, versus a site where the person behind it is clearly stated — of course the second one gets trusted more. That is obvious when someone says it out loud. I just had never thought about it.
Building the three pages with Kuro
The one I braced myself for was the privacy policy. It sounds legal and difficult, and I did not feel capable of writing one myself.
But this too was something I could hand over to Kuro.
I’ll write it to match how your blog actually works. That you plan to use ads (and therefore cookies) in the future, that you have analytics installed, that you have a contact form — I’ll prepare text that reflects those.
My job was to paste the text that came back into a fixed page. That was all.
The contact page was the form I had struggled with so much last time. And for the profile, Kuro and I put together my self-introduction as AI Taro, the pen name I write under: an office clerk in his forties, fishing as a hobby, someone who started all this out of a real fear of having his job taken by AI.
Then Kuro added one more thing I would never have thought of.
Let’s also put links to these three pages in the footer, at the bottom of every page. That way your operator information can be reached from anywhere on the site.
Small details like that — the kind of thing a review actually looks at — being handed to me before I trip over them is genuinely helpful.
“How many posts do I need?”
The next thing on my mind was the number of articles. I asked how many I would need to write to get through, and the answer was honest.
There is no published standard for the number of articles. What is generally said is that having a certain amount of substantial content built up works in your favor.
No “write twenty and you are guaranteed to pass.” When something is unknown, Kuro says it is unknown. Oddly enough, that is exactly what made me trust the rest of the advice.
Luckily, keeping this series going bit by bit meant that at the point of applying I had around ten articles lined up. The foundation seemed to be there.
The application itself, step by step
With the preparation done, it was time to apply. Kuro walked me through this part in order as well.
Sign in to the official AdSense site with your Google account and register your blog’s URL. After that you’ll be given a piece of code, and you paste it into your blog. This is the step that confirms “yes, this site really is yours.”
“Paste the code” is the kind of phrase that makes me tense up. But the theme I use, Cocoon — a free Japanese WordPress theme — turns out to have an input field built in specifically for that code. Kuro told me where to find it, and pasting it there was the entire job.
After that, submit the application and wait for the result.
What this job actually felt like
With an AdSense application, the biggest wall for me was not the procedure. It was not knowing what to prepare. The steps themselves were not frightening; having no view of the road ahead was.
Kuro took that worry and laid it out in order. First these three pages. Then the articles. Then the application. Honest about what is not known, clear about what needs to be done. Because of that, I did not get lost. I just moved one step at a time.
AI is not a magic box that knows every answer. But it can turn “I have no idea where to start” into “do this next.” For a beginner, I cannot overstate how reassuring that alone is. That is what I felt this time.
I will add the review result to this article once it comes. Even if I fail, I can work out the cause and apply again — and if that happens, I plan to think through the fix with Kuro too.
What I am using for this
The theme on this blog is Cocoon. It is free, yet it comes with a field for the AdSense code from the start, and the places beginners tend to stumble are made simple. It fits a blog aiming at monetization very well.
Cocoon works on any server, but with Xserver — the Japanese hosting service my blog runs on — you can set it up at the same time as you start WordPress, which makes getting going much easier for a beginner.
Next time I will write about connecting the blog to social media, specifically Instagram, to bring people in — along with the conversation with Kuro that went with it.
If you want to read ahead: here is how I added an Instagram link to my blog, and here is what I did when an AdSense answer came back as a rejection, in how to ask AI after an AdSense rejection.
