How to Target Competitor Audiences on Google Ads (2026)

Half the guides still ranking for this query tell you to build a "similar audience," a feature Google switched off back in 2023. The other half wave a hand at "just make a custom audience" and never show you the click-path or the thinking behind it. Meanwhile the mental model most marketers carry is the wrong one: that you can somehow reach into a competitor's account and pull out their customer list. You can't. What Google actually lets you do is target signals of competitor interest: the sites people browse, the terms they search, the videos they watch. That distinction is the whole game, and once it clicks, the setup is straightforward.

This guide walks the current, correct method end to end: the exact Audience Manager path for a competitor custom segment, how to put your ads in front of a competitor's customers on YouTube, when brand-keyword bidding makes sense, what quietly replaced similar audiences, and, the part nobody else covers, how to decide which rival and which angle are even worth targeting before you spend a dollar.

Can you actually target a competitor's audience on Google Ads?

Yes, you can target a competitor's audience on Google Ads, but only through signals Google infers, never their actual customer list. Google won't hand you a rival's users. Instead it builds an audience of people whose behavior resembles that competitor's customers: who's been browsing sites like theirs, searching their brand, or watching their videos. You point Google at the competitor; Google finds the lookalike behavior.

That's an important reframe, because "can you target competitor with Google Ads" usually hides a wish for something precise: a list, a lookalike seed, a guarantee. What you get is broader and fuzzier: probabilistic reach toward people who've shown interest in the category and the competitor specifically. Still useful. Just not surgical.

There are four levers that actually work, and the rest of this guide is about running them well: custom segments (built from competitor URLs and keywords), in-market and affinity segments, YouTube placement targeting on a competitor's channel, and bidding on their brand terms. Each reaches a slightly different slice of the same demand.

What are the real ways to target competitor audiences on Google Ads?

The real ways to target competitors audience on Google Ads break down into four methods, each running on a different surface and reaching a different slice of intent. Here's the map before we walk the two that do the most work step by step.

Method	Where it runs	Who it reaches	Setup effort
Custom segments (competitor URLs + keywords)	Display, Demand Gen, Gmail, YouTube	People who browse or search like a competitor's audience	Medium
In-market & affinity segments	Display, YouTube, Demand Gen, Search	People Google already flags as in-market for the category	Low
YouTube placement targeting	YouTube	People watching a competitor's channel or videos	Low-medium
Brand-keyword bidding	Search	People actively searching the competitor by name	Low
Customer Match (your own lists)	Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail	Your prospects, not the rival's, for exclusions or upsell	Low

Custom segments and YouTube placements do the heaviest lifting for competitor targeting, so those get the full walkthrough. In-market and affinity segments are worth a quick word: they're pre-built audiences Google maintains ("in-market for CRM software," "affinity: small business owners"), and you layer them on with two clicks. They won't isolate a single competitor, but they'll narrow you to the category before you add a competitor custom segment on top. Think of them as the coarse filter before the fine one.

How do you build a custom segment with competitor URLs and keywords?

You build a competitor custom segment in Audience Manager by entering the competitor's URLs and the keywords their customers search, then attaching that segment to a Display, Demand Gen, Gmail, or YouTube campaign. This is the closest Google gets to "target this specific rival's audience," and it's the method most of the ranking guides gesture at without finishing. Google's own About custom segments doc is the reference; here's the actual path.

Set up the segment in Audience Manager

1. Click the Tools icon, then open Shared library → Audience manager.
2. Select Custom segments, then the blue plus button to create a new one.
3. Name it something you'll recognize later, "Competitor X shoppers" beats "Custom segment 3."
4. Choose your signal type: people with certain interests/purchase intentions, or people who searched specific terms.

One thing to hold onto: a custom segment is not remarketing. The people in it never had to visit your site. That's what makes it useful for stealing some of a rival's demand, you're reaching their interested audience, not re-reaching your own.

URLs vs keywords: interest signals vs search signals

This is where you decide what "competitor interest" means. When you learn how to target competitor URLs in Google Ads, you're using the URL signal: enter the competitor's domain and Google reaches "people who browse websites similar to" it. (Note Google's caveat, your ads don't show on those URLs; the URL just describes the audience.) Drop in their pricing page, their demo page, their comparison pages; higher-intent pages pull higher-intent people.

The keyword signal works differently. You can pick "people with any of these interests or purchase intentions" for broad reach, or the tighter "people who searched for any of these terms on Google", and for competitor targeting, tighter usually wins. Feed it the competitor's brand plus buying-signal modifiers: "[competitor] pricing," "[competitor] reviews," "[competitor] alternative." If you want maximum precision, combine URLs and keywords with narrow "AND" targeting rather than the looser "OR."

Which campaign types can use this audience?

Custom segments run in Display, Demand Gen, Gmail, and Video (YouTube) campaigns, not directly in Search or Shopping, and not directly in Performance Max, where they act as audience signals rather than hard targeting. This trips people up constantly. They build a beautiful competitor segment and then go looking for it in a Search campaign where it does not apply. Display is where most competitor custom segments live, and the reach is enormous, the Google Display Network spans more than 2 million sites and reaches over 90% of internet users. Plenty of room to find a competitor's audience mid-browse.

How do you run YouTube ads on a competitor's channels and videos?

You run YouTube ads on a competitor's channels and videos by adding them as placements in a Video campaign. It's one of the most concrete plays in this whole guide and one of the least covered, you're putting your ad directly in front of people who are, at that moment, watching the competition.

1. Create or open a Video campaign in Google Ads.
2. Go to Content → Placements → YouTube channels (or YouTube videos).
3. Search the competitor's brand name.
4. Add their channel as a managed placement, and add their highest-traffic videos individually.
5. Prioritize their product demos, tutorials, and any "review," "vs," or "alternative" videos about them.

The intent logic here is strong. Someone watching a competitor's product demo or a "[competitor] review" video is deep in consideration, they're evaluating, which is exactly when a well-placed alternative can change the outcome. The catch: placement inventory can be thin for smaller channels, and you may not get much volume from a single competitor. Pair it with a custom segment so your Video campaign has somewhere to go when the exact placements run dry. And yes, this is also how you get in front of people consuming competitor content on YouTube more broadly, not just the one channel.

Should you also bid on a competitor's brand terms?

Bidding on a competitor's brand terms is the most direct way to reach their audience on Search, it puts your ad in front of people already typing the rival's name into Google. There's no lookalike inference here; the intent is explicit. Someone searching "[competitor]" is in the market, right now, for something the competitor sells.

The high-intent patterns worth building around:

• [competitor]: the brand name itself
• [competitor] pricing: comparison shoppers weighing cost
• [competitor] reviews: people validating before they commit
• [competitor] alternative: the softest target on the board; they're already looking to leave
• [competitor] vs [you]: head-to-head shoppers who know both names

Two honest caveats. This is usually the priciest, lowest-quality-score traffic you'll buy, you'll pay a premium and sit lower on their own brand name, because Google rewards the advertiser most relevant to the query (that's them). And the legal line matters: bidding on the keyword is generally fine; using their trademark in your ad text is restricted. More on that below, but if you want the full breakdown, we cover it in can I use competitor brand keywords in Google Ads, and the reconnaissance side in how to check competitors' Google Ads. Send this traffic to a real comparison page, never your homepage.

Wait, what happened to similar audiences?

What happened to similar audiences is straightforward: Google retired the feature in 2023, so skip any older guide that still tells you to build one. New similar audiences stopped generating on May 1, 2023, and existing ones were pulled from all ad groups and campaigns by that August. What replaced them, by campaign type:

• Optimized targeting: Display and Demand Gen
• Audience expansion: Video
• Smart Bidding: Search and Shopping

So when a 2021 blog post tells you to seed a similar audience off a competitor list, it's describing plumbing that no longer exists. Use custom segments for the competitor signal and let optimized targeting do the expanding.

How do you decide which competitors and angles to actually target?

Before you build a single segment, decide who's worth targeting and what message will actually land, by studying the competitor's live ads. The mechanics above are the easy part; Google hands everyone the same custom-segment builder. The edge comes from picking the right rival and the right angle, and that decision should be evidence-based, not a guess.

The workflow is simple. First, list your real competitors, the ones actually taking your demand, not the aspirational names on a strategy deck. Second, pull their live ads and read what they're spending on right now: the offers and hooks they keep running. That tells you which URLs and keywords to feed a custom segment (the pages they push, the terms they own) and what counter-message to write. Third, map their most-run creative against your landing page so your ad answers the exact pitch a prospect just saw.

Here's the honest limit, and it folds in a question people always ask, can I see what interest or audience a competitor's ad is targeting? Not really. Google's Ads Transparency Center shows you a competitor's creative, its format, and roughly when it last ran, but not their spend, keywords, or targeting. You infer the audience from the creative and the offer, not from a targeting readout. And the free tools each stop somewhere. The Transparency Center is manual, one advertiser at a time, and runs a 48 to 72 hour lag with no read on the creative itself. Auction Insights shows who you overlap with but never their keywords or bids. SpyFu and SEMrush estimate the keyword gap. Useful, all of them, and all a little slow.

This is the research step where Proxy fits. It's a competitive ad intelligence tool that lives inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor, you ask "show me what [competitor] is running on Google right now" and get their live ads plus a read on the hook and angle in one message, instead of tab-hopping the Transparency Center. It covers Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, so you can study the same rival across the channels you're about to target, and it transcribes video ads so you can lift the actual angle they're leading with. Running that sweep by hand, combing each platform's ad library and compiling the creative into a spreadsheet, costs a creative strategist about two hours per research pass by Proxy's own benchmark, and that's the part it collapses into a single question. The honest limitation: Proxy does not build or manage audiences inside Google Ads, you still set up the segment yourself, and it needs an AI client like ChatGPT or Claude to run. It's for the research and the decision, not the campaign wiring. Free to start, 30 credits a month, no card. For the full reconnaissance playbook, our guide on how to spy on competitors' ads goes deeper.

The same idea plays out beyond Google, by the way. On Meta you can build custom audiences and lookalikes off competitor-interested signals, we cover that in how to target competitors' audience on Facebook ads, and on Twitter/X you can aim ads at people using a competitor's branded hashtags. Google's version is signal-based rather than list-based, which is why the research matters more here: you're briefing an algorithm, not uploading a spreadsheet.

Is targeting competitor audiences against Google's policies?

No, targeting competitor-interested audiences is within Google's rules, with one line you shouldn't cross: their trademark in your ad text. Bidding on competitor keywords and building competitor-URL custom segments are both allowed. What's restricted is using the rival's trademark in your headline or description, and Google only acts when the trademark owner files a complaint, enforcement is complaint-driven, and as of 2025 it's advertiser-specific rather than a blanket keyword block. US case law has repeatedly sided with advertisers on keyword selection (a court even treated agreements banning competitor-keyword bidding as anticompetitive); the UK and EU are stricter about ads that imply a connection to the brand.

The bigger question is whether it's worth it. Competitor audiences skew lower-intent than your own remarketing, and there's a specific tax: competitor employees and researchers click these ads out of curiosity, inflating your click-through rate while tanking conversions. So go in with guardrails.

• Don't put the competitor's trademark in your ad text.
• Do not send clicks to your homepage, build a comparison page that speaks to someone weighing you against them.
• Expect a lower quality score and higher CPC on their brand name; that's normal.
• Exclude your own converters and, where you can, obvious competitor traffic.

Start broad with exclusions, then tighten on data. Competitor targeting rewards patience more than aggression.

Final thoughts

The setup is the part everyone teaches, and it's genuinely the easy bit, a few clicks in Audience Manager and you've got a competitor segment live. The hard part, the part that decides whether any of this works, is knowing which rival is actually eating your lunch and what they're saying to your prospects while they do it. That answer isn't in the targeting UI. It's in their live ads, running right now, telling you exactly what they're betting on. Get the reconnaissance right and the targeting almost writes itself; skip it and you're just paying Google to guess. On Google Ads you never get a competitor's customer list, you get their signal, and what you do with it is the whole edge.