How to Find Competitor Ads (Free & at Scale)

If you want to find your competitors' ads, almost everything you need is already public and free. Platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn are legally required to keep searchable ad libraries, so any brand's live creatives, ad copy, and how long each ad has been running are a few clicks away. This guide walks through where to look on each platform, then how to analyze what you find and pull it at scale.

First, the free official ad libraries - one section each for Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn - so you can find, see, and view competitor ads on every major channel. Then the paid ad spy tools that go deeper, how to actually analyze competitor ads once you've got them, and what to do with what you learn.

In a hurry: the fastest free route is the Meta Ad Library for Facebook and Instagram and the Google Ads Transparency Center for search and display ads. The rest of the guide builds on those two.

What competitor ad research actually tells you

A rival's ads are market research you did not have to pay for. Laid out side by side, they show four things:

• Which creatives they're betting on. The angles, hooks, and formats a brand keeps running are the ones working. An ad that has been live for months is one the brand keeps paying for.
• What they're saying. Ad copy reveals positioning, offers, and the pain points a competitor thinks resonate - often before it shows up anywhere else on their site.
• Where they're spending. A brand running heavy on TikTok and quiet on Google is telling you where it believes its audience is. Volume across platforms is a rough map of priorities.
• How active they are. Ad counts and start dates show whether a competitor is scaling up, testing, or gone dark - useful for timing your own pushes and for qualifying sales prospects.

The aim is to skip the expensive part of testing, finding angles that work, by reading the results of campaigns your competitors already paid to run.

Meta Ad Library - find competitor ads on Facebook & Instagram (free)

The Meta Ad Library is the place to start, and it is free. It holds every ad currently running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads - which, for most B2C and DTC brands, is the bulk of their spend.

To find a competitor's ads:

• Open the Meta Ad Library and set the country and category (use "All ads" for ordinary brand campaigns).
• Type the competitor's brand or Facebook Page name into the search box.
• Browse their live creatives. For each ad you can see the image or video, the ad copy, the date it started running, and which platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) it's on.
• Click an ad to see whether multiple versions of it are running - a sign the brand is A/B testing that concept.

What to pay attention to: ads that have been running a long time (winners worth studying), how many active ads a brand has (a proxy for how aggressively it's spending), and repeated creative themes across ads.

The Meta Ad Library is built for looking up one advertiser at a time by hand. There's an official API, but its full data is limited to ads shown in the UK and EU plus political and social-issue ads worldwide, and getting access requires ID verification and an app review that increasingly turns down "competitor monitoring." For a rival or two it works. For pulling Facebook ads across hundreds of domains, you will want a Facebook ad scraper instead.

Google Ads Transparency Center - see competitor search & display ads (free)

Google's equivalent is the Ads Transparency Center, and it's where you go to view competitor display ads, search ads, Shopping, and YouTube creatives - all free. Meta and Google between them cover most of where your competitors advertise.

To find competitor display ads here:

• Go to the Ads Transparency Center and search for the competitor's advertiser name or website domain.
• Filter by region and by format - you can isolate text, image (display), and video ads.
• Open any creative to see the date range it ran, the formats, and the regions it was shown in.

Banner and responsive display creatives are easy to miss because they show up across millions of publisher sites rather than in one feed, but the Transparency Center collects them all in one place. If you want to see competitor display ads - the actual banners running across the Google Display Network and YouTube - this is where they are.

There is no official API and no bulk export, so it is a manual, one-advertiser-at-a-time tool. To pull Google and YouTube ads programmatically across many competitors, use a Google ad scraper.

TikTok and LinkedIn ad libraries

Two more official libraries cover the remaining platforms. Which one matters depends on your market.

TikTok Commercial Content Library. TikTok maintains a Commercial Content Library covering ads shown in the EU/EEA, searchable by advertiser, keyword, date, and targeting. For consumer brands selling to younger audiences it is worth checking even though coverage is limited to Europe. Its separate Creative Center also surfaces top-performing ads by industry for inspiration.

LinkedIn Ad Library. For B2B, LinkedIn is the one that matters. The LinkedIn Ad Library lets you search any company and see the ads it's running, including the copy and creative. Because LinkedIn is where most B2B demand-gen spend lands, finding a competitor's LinkedIn ads tells you a lot about their messaging to buyers and decision-makers. Impressions, run dates and targeting appear only on ads that reached the EU; our LinkedIn Ad Library guide covers what each ad shows and how to search it. As with the others, it's built for manual lookups; for bulk B2B intelligence, a LinkedIn ad scraper covers it.

Between Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn, you can find almost any competitor's ads for free. The libraries differ in coverage and polish, but the workflow is the same everywhere: search the brand, read the creatives, note the long-runners.

Third-party ad spy tools - when free libraries aren't enough

The official libraries are free and official, but they share two weaknesses: they only show what's running right now, and they make you check each platform separately, one advertiser at a time. Paid ad spy tools exist to fix both - adding historical archives, cross-platform search, creative storage, and filtering by engagement, format, or country.

The four kinds of tool:

• Creative databases (AdSpy, BigSpy, Minea, PowerAdSpy) - huge archives of past and present ads with deep filters, popular with e-commerce and dropshipping marketers hunting proven creative.
• Spend & media-buying intelligence (Semrush + AdClarity, SpyFu) - estimated competitor ad spend, publisher mix, and PPC keyword data for agencies and media buyers.
• Native & push specialists (Anstrex, AdPlexity) - the open-web ad types the big libraries ignore.
• API-first platforms (Adyntel) - built to pull ad data programmatically, across Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, into your own systems at scale.

We compared the full set - features, pricing, free options, and API access - in our roundup of the 12 best ad spy tools in 2026. If you are browsing a rival or two, a dashboard tool is fine. If competitor ad research is a repeatable workflow - scoring a prospect list, refreshing a rival set monthly, feeding creatives into your CRM - you'll want an API rather than a UI you click around in.

Pulling competitor ad data at scale

You cannot run a thousand domains through a dashboard. Once "find this competitor's ads" becomes "find ad activity across my whole prospect list, every month," clicking stops working.

Adyntel is built for that. It's API-first: one call covers one domain on one platform and returns the live ad count plus the full creatives - in real time, pulled on request rather than from a stale cache. Call Meta, Google, and LinkedIn for the same domain and you can compare volume and formats across all three to see where a rival is concentrating its ad spend. Run that across a whole list and you've got an ad-activity signal on thousands of companies in minutes.

The data lands where you work. Instead of exporting CSVs by hand, Adyntel drops into the tools teams already use - Clay to enrich any table with live ad counts and creatives, an MCP server to query ad data from Claude or any AI agent, plus Slack, n8n, and CRMs like HubSpot. Pricing is pay-as-you-go - fractions of a cent per call, no flat monthly seat fee - which costs less than a subscription when usage comes in bursts. You can start with free credits to test it before committing.

How to analyze competitor ads once you've found them

Finding the ads is half the job. Competitor ad analysis turns a pile of creatives into a read on strategy. Work through them in this order:

• Creative angle. What's the core hook of each ad - price, social proof, fear of missing out, a specific feature? Group the ads by angle and you'll see which themes a competitor leans on most.
• Ad copy. Read the headlines and body text for offers, positioning, and the language they use to describe the problem. Recurring phrases reveal the messaging they've decided works.
• Longevity. An ad still running after 60 or 90 days is paying for itself, because brands stop losers fast. Long-runners are the creatives to study.
• Volume and cadence. Is the brand running 5 ads or 500? Launching new creative weekly or sitting still? This shows how aggressively they're testing and spending.
• Format mix. Video vs. static, carousel vs. single image, Stories vs. feed. The mix tells you which formats they've found efficient on each platform.
• Cross-platform strategy. Compare the same brand across Meta, Google, and LinkedIn. A different message on each is a deliberate audience choice worth understanding.

Look for patterns. A theme that shows up across a dozen long-running ads is a strategy. One clever creative is not. A note of caution on any "ad spend" figure you'll see in paid tools: it's almost always an estimate, useful as a directional signal, not a number to quote as fact.

What to do with what you find

Competitor ad research only pays off if it changes what you do next. The common moves:

• Build a swipe file. Save the best competitor creatives and copy as a reference library for your own brainstorming - most ad spy tools let you bookmark ads for this.
• Test their winning angles. Take a proven angle (not the exact creative) and adapt it to your brand and audience. You skip the discovery cost.
• Find gaps. Angles, platforms, or audiences your competitors are ignoring are openings for you.
• Monitor over time. Checking monthly shows who is scaling, who has pulled back, and what new messaging is being tested. For ongoing tracking at scale, automate it with an API rather than re-checking by hand.
• Qualify prospects (B2B/sales). If you sell to advertisers, "is this company running ads, and where?" is a fast way to score and prioritize accounts. To see what that signal looks like across a real cohort, browse our free YC companies list - ad counts for all 5,906 Y Combinator startups.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find my competitors' ads for free?

Use the official ad libraries: the Meta Ad Library for Facebook and Instagram, the Google Ads Transparency Center for search and display ads, plus the TikTok Commercial Content Library and LinkedIn Ad Library. Search the competitor's brand name and you'll see their live creatives, ad copy, and start dates - all free, no account needed.

Can I see a competitor's display ads?

Yes. The Google Ads Transparency Center collects banner and responsive display ads from across the Google Display Network and YouTube in one place. Search the advertiser, filter to image or video formats, and you can view competitor display ads with their date ranges and regions.

Is it legal to look at competitor ads?

Yes. These ads are already public - platforms like Meta, Google, and LinkedIn are legally required to maintain searchable ad libraries. You're viewing information anyone can access, just organized and at scale.

How do I find competitor ad data at scale?

The free libraries are manual, one-advertiser-at-a-time tools. To find and analyze ads across hundreds or thousands of domains, use an API-first platform like Adyntel, which returns ad counts and creatives for any domain on Meta, Google, or LinkedIn and pipes the data into tools like Clay, Slack, and HubSpot. To see the output at scale, browse our free Shopify stores list - 19,414 ecommerce brands with per-platform ad counts.

What's the best way to analyze competitor ads?

Group ads by creative angle and ad copy theme, flag the long-running ones (likely winners), and compare volume and format mix across platforms. Look for repeated patterns rather than single clever ads - the themes a competitor keeps running are the strategies worth learning from.

The bottom line

Finding your competitors' ads is easy and mostly free: the Meta Ad Library, Google Ads Transparency Center, and the TikTok and LinkedIn libraries will show you any brand's live creatives in minutes. The harder part is doing it repeatedly, across many competitors, and turning the results into something you can act on. When competitor ad intelligence becomes a monthly routine, an API-first tool like Adyntel lets you pull any competitor's full ad library across Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, run a thousand domains at once, and route the data straight into your stack.

Start with free credits →