How to Spy on Competitors Ads: Free 2026 Guide

Every brand's paid strategy is sitting in public ad libraries right now: the creatives, the hooks, the run dates, the angles they keep doubling down on. Almost nobody reads them, because the libraries are a slog and the data comes out raw, and the tools that promise to fix that mostly sell you a Meta-only dashboard. So most people land on how to spy on competitors ads, open one library, scroll for a while, and give up.

This guide takes the honest arc instead. First the free manual method, platform by platform, including LinkedIn, which most write-ups skip entirely. Then how to find your competitors ads faster once the clicking gets old. No paywall in the middle. The whole method is free, and knowing how to spy on competitor ads by hand is worth doing even if you never touch a tool.

How do you spy on competitors' ads right now?

To spy on competitors' ads you have two routes: search each platform's free official ad library by hand, or ask an AI assistant to pull them across platforms in seconds. Start with the official libraries, they're free and authoritative, with no login needed for a one-brand look. Here's the map before we go deep:

1. Meta Ads Library (facebook.com/ads/library): every active Facebook and Instagram ad, searchable by brand Page.
2. Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com): Search, YouTube, and Display ads, searchable by advertiser or domain.
3. LinkedIn Ad Library (linkedin.com/ad-library): every ad a company runs on LinkedIn, free, no login.
4. TikTok Commercial Content Library: TikTok's official ad archive.

That's how to see what ads your competitors are running, one platform at a time. The faster route is to ask an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude, with Proxy connected, to pull all of them at once and tell you the common angle. We'll get there. First, the honest question everyone quietly asks.

Is it legal and ethical to spy on a competitor's ads?

Yes, spying on a competitor's ads is legal and above-board, because the ad libraries are public archives the platforms built on purpose. Facebook launched its searchable Ad Library on March 28, 2019, expanding from a political-only archive to "all active ads about anything," and it made the whole thing accessible even if you don't have a Facebook account. Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok have since built their own versions. Reading them is exactly the behavior these tools were designed to enable.

A "competitor ad" here just means any paid creative a rival brand is currently running: the image, video, or copy they're spending money to put in front of an audience you also want. Nothing about looking at it is a grey area. As one marketer put it on Hacker News the day the library launched, "it will now be fairly easy to piece together another company's Facebook marketing and ad campaigns." That was the point.

The ethics get more interesting than the legality. Transparency archives exist for accountability: Google, for its part, removed over 5.2 billion ads and suspended more than 6.7 million advertiser accounts in 2022, and public libraries are part of how that scrutiny works. Marketers use them for a different reason: to read what's working across the street. Both things are true at once. There's a line between studying a rival's angle and lifting their creative outright, and the library hands you the raw material for either. Where you draw that line is on you, not the tool.

How do you spy on your competitors' ads across every platform?

To spy on your competitors' ads platform by platform, you work through four free libraries in turn: Meta first, then Google, then LinkedIn, then TikTok and YouTube. That order isn't random. Meta has the deepest, easiest-to-search archive, so it's where most people learn how to find competitor ads before moving on. Each library has its own quirks and its own blind spots, and knowing how to find competitors ads on one doesn't automatically translate to the next.

So we'll pull up a rival's live creatives on each platform in sequence, note what you can read from the results, and flag what that particular library refuses to show you. The blind spots matter as much as the ads. They're the reason the "what they can't show" section exists a few scrolls down. Let's start where the creatives are richest.

How do you search the Meta Ads Library for a competitor?

To search the Meta Ads Library for a competitor, open the library, set the country and category, and type the brand's Page name. This is the single richest source of competitor creative on the internet, so it's worth learning to read properly, not just to open. Here's the sequence:

1. Go to Meta's own Ad Library, no login needed for a quick look.
2. Set the country you care about and choose the "All ads" category (the default "Issues, elections or politics" filter hides ordinary commercial ads).
3. Type the competitor's Page name in the search box. One nuance trips people up: keyword search only works for political and issue ads. For a normal brand, you search the Page, not the ad copy. A marketer on the launch thread spelled it out: "you can still go to a company's page and see all ads posted by that page." That's your route for how to find the ads of a competitor shop by name.
4. Filter by platform to separate Facebook from Instagram placements, and by format if you only want video.
5. Scan the results, and here's the part most people miss: look at run dates. An ad still active after 30, 60, or 90-plus days is almost certainly profitable, nobody keeps paying for a creative that doesn't convert. Sort your eye toward the long-runners, those are the winners the brand is quietly scaling.

That last habit, reading longevity as a performance signal, is how you turn a wall of creatives into an actual read on strategy. The Meta library will happily show you 200 ads and tell you nothing about which ones matter; the run dates are the tell.

For the deeper platform-specific playbook, see the full Facebook ads guide and the Instagram ads guide. The one honest limit to keep in mind here: this shows you what's live, not what it cost or how it performed. More on that gap shortly.

How do you use the Google Ads Transparency Center?

To use the Google Ads Transparency Center, go to the site, search the advertiser's name or domain, then filter by region and date. The catch up front, because it's the opposite of Meta: you cannot search by a phrase inside the ad. You start from who is advertising, not what they said.

1. Open the Google Ads Transparency Center.
2. Search the advertiser's brand name or domain (e.g. notion.so). There's no keyword-in-creative search here, a genuine limitation people have been asking Google to fix for a while.
3. Set the region and date range filters to narrow the pull.
4. Click any ad to see its format, the regions it ran in, and when it last ran.

Launched March 29, 2023, the center is a searchable hub of every ad from verified advertisers across Google Search, YouTube, and Display, and more than 30 million people touch Google's transparency and control menus every day, so this isn't some obscure corner. It's the single place to check a rival's Search, Display, and YouTube presence at once. For channel-specific depth, see the full Google ads guide and the display ads guide.

Using an SEO tool to trace a competitor's Google ad history (Ahrefs, Semrush, SpyFu)

To trace a competitor's Google ad history, an SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or SpyFu shows the paid keywords and past ad copy the Transparency Center leaves out. This is the answer for anyone trying to find a competitor's ads via Ahrefs or check which ad words a rival bids on: the Transparency Center shows you live creatives, but these tools show you the keyword strategy and the historical trail behind them. SimilarWeb sits in the same bucket. The cap is honest: they're strong for Google keyword history and weak-to-useless at reading a rival's Facebook or LinkedIn creative, so they complement the libraries rather than replace them.

Can you see a competitor's LinkedIn ads?

Yes, you can see a competitor's LinkedIn ads free in the LinkedIn Ad Library, with no login required. This is the platform almost every write-up and almost every paid tool quietly skips, which makes it the easiest place to get an edge, since so few people bother to look.

1. Open the LinkedIn Ad Library.
2. Search the company name.
3. Open any ad to see its format, the advertiser, and the payer behind it.
4. If the ad was served in the EU, you get extra: impression ranges, targeting parameters, and the dates it ran, disclosure LinkedIn adds to comply with EU rules.

The load-bearing fact: the LinkedIn Ad Library covers every ad that ran on LinkedIn after June 1, 2023, and keeps each one for a full year after its last impression. For B2B and SaaS marketers, this is the richest free source of competitor intelligence going, and hardly anyone uses it. See the full LinkedIn ads guide for the deeper walkthrough. Keep this in your back pocket, it's the gap the tools ignore, and we'll come back to why that matters.

How do you check a competitor's TikTok and YouTube ads?

To check a competitor's TikTok ads, use TikTok's Commercial Content Library; for YouTube ads, they show up inside the Google Ads Transparency Center you already searched. Two platforms, two very different amounts of effort.

1. For TikTok, open the TikTok Commercial Content Library, set the region, and search the advertiser. Coverage and filters vary by country, so it's less polished than Meta's.
2. For YouTube, you don't need a separate tool, filter for video formats inside the Google center, or see the full YouTube ads guide for the specifics.

One honest flag: TikTok is the coverage gap for the AI tools in this space, so for now, manual is the only reliable route there.

Beyond the big five, the thin platforms rarely get their own library. X (formerly Twitter) shut its public ad transparency center down. Amazon, Pinterest, and the Shopping, native, and banner-display networks mostly surface only through third-party tools or the SEO platforms above, and old-school channels like TV and generic display spend live outside any ad library entirely. For those, the paid tools and an SEO trace are your best bet, but for the vast majority of competitor ad research, the four free libraries cover the ground that matters.

What can the free ad libraries not show you?

The free libraries can't show you the numbers that matter most: for ordinary commercial ads there's no spend, no reach, and no performance data at all. You see the creative and the fact that it's running. You don't see whether it's working, only that the brand hasn't turned it off yet.

Library	What it shows	What it can't show
Meta Ad Library	Live creatives, format, run dates, Page	Spend, reach, CTR, conversions on commercial ads; anything inactive
Google Transparency Center	Live/recent ads, format, regions, last-run date	Spend, performance, keyword-in-creative search
LinkedIn Ad Library	Creative, format, advertiser, payer (EU: impressions + targeting)	Full targeting and spend outside the EU; non-EU performance

A few specifics worth internalizing. Estimated spend and impression ranges appear only for ads about social issues, elections, or politics, and those political ads are the one category kept for seven years with funding and demographic detail. Everything commercial is active-only and number-free. Meta's Ad Library API exposes no targeting and no engagement data either, no clicks, no likes, no shares, so you can't reconstruct who an ad reached. Peer-reviewed analysis put it plainly: the library reports spend and reach "only in ranges rather than absolute numbers," with no real targeting insight beyond broad age, gender, and geography.

None of this is a knock on Meta specifically. A 2024 Mozilla and Check First stress test found Meta had "among the most mature" ad repository of any platform and still had "big gaps in data and functionality." The libraries are a starting point, not a finish line. And the friction is real, one early user reported being "blocked by Facebook after 2 searches," a reminder that manual digging has always had a ceiling.

Do you need a paid spy tool, or is the free library enough?

For a quick one-brand look the free official libraries are enough; you graduate to a paid tool when you need history, saved swipe files, or coverage the libraries don't give you. The honest way to decide is to look at what each option actually covers versus what it costs.

Option	Coverage	Cost	What it shows / misses
Official libraries (Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok)	All four platforms	Free	Live creatives; no spend, no history, no saved swipe files
Foreplay	Meta-first	Paid	Polished swipe-file organization; dashboard-bound, skips LinkedIn
AdSpy / BigSpy	Meta-heavy	Paid	Deep Meta back-catalog; single-platform-leaning, no LinkedIn, no video transcription
MagicBrief	Meta/creative	Paid	Clean creative organization for teams; another dashboard to switch into
SpyFu / Semrush	Google keywords	Paid	Strong Google ad and keyword history; not built to read Facebook or LinkedIn creative
Proxy	Meta, Google, LinkedIn	Free to start	Pulls and reads all three in one ask; no TikTok yet, needs an AI client

The official libraries win the "free and authoritative" category outright, for confirming what one competitor is running today, nothing beats going straight to the source. Foreplay genuinely earns its keep if your whole job is collecting and organizing winning Meta creatives visually; that swipe-file workflow is nice, and it's built for exactly that. The paid tools mostly frustrate for the same reason the Mozilla stress test flagged: the gaps push you toward a subscription, and then you're inside another dashboard learning another interface. Which brings us to the option that doesn't ask you to learn a dashboard at all.

What's the faster way to pull competitor ads across platforms?

The faster way to pull competitor ads is to stop opening ad libraries and start asking: you type one question to your AI assistant and get the live ads plus a read on the angle, instead of tab-hopping across three separate libraries. That's the whole shift: answers, not browsing. You already do this research. This just skips the clicking.

Here's what it looks like in practice. Say you want Notion's current strategy. You open ChatGPT or Claude, with Proxy connected, and type:

"Pull Notion's active ads across Meta, Google, and LinkedIn and tell me the common angle."

And the answer comes back in the chat: the live creatives from each library, plus a read on what ties them together. Which hook they're leaning on. Which platform gets which message, and which ad has been running longest. No three tabs, no Page-name-versus-keyword gotchas, no switching between a Google domain search and a LinkedIn company search. One question, one answer, all three platforms. And the time back is the real payoff: Proxy saves marketers an average of about two hours per competitive research pass, the work of combing Meta's Ad Library and Google's Ads Transparency Center by hand and compiling it all into a spreadsheet, handed back as a single answer.

Proxy is a free MCP server that does this. It covers Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google, and LinkedIn, and that last one is the piece almost no other tool touches, so this is the one place you get all three read together. It runs inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor, the tools you already have open. The free tier is 30 credits a month, five a day, no credit card and no API keys. Setup is one connect step: OAuth handles the login, there's no dashboard to configure and no separate account to babysit, it just lives where you already work.

The honest catch, because there always is one: it's MCP-based, so you do need an AI client like ChatGPT or Claude to use it, and if your team lives entirely in a browser dashboard, that's a shift. It doesn't cover TikTok yet, so for TikTok creatives you're back to the manual library. And the free tier caps credits daily, so a heavy research week can hit the ceiling. For a single quick check of one brand, honestly, the official library is right there and free, start there. The reason to ask instead is the moment you're pulling three platforms, reading angles, and doing it more than once a week.

How do you read the hook in a competitor's video ad?

To read the hook in a competitor's video ad, you have the ad transcribed and broken down for you, the opening line, the angle, and the offer, without downloading the file. Video is where manual research falls apart completely: the library shows you a muted thumbnail and a play button, and actually watching thirty competitor videos to find the pattern is nobody's afternoon.

Why bother reading the hook at all? Because the first few seconds carry the whole ad, and because rotation tells a story. Meta's own ads-analytics team found that after roughly four exposures to the same creative, a viewer's likelihood of converting drops about 45%. That's exactly why a rival keeps swapping in fresh video, and why the hook keeps getting reworked. Reading which opening lines they cycle through tells you what angle they're testing.

The ask is as plain as the last one. Type "what's the hook in Notion's newest video ad?" and you get the transcript back, the spoken opening, the on-screen text, the offer, and where the pitch turns, pulled and read inside the chat, no file to download or scrub through. Proxy handles the transcription and the hook breakdown, and you read the strategy instead of the subtitles.

How do you monitor a competitor's new ads over time?

To monitor a competitor's new ads over time, you either bookmark each library and re-check sorted by newest, or set your AI assistant to pull their latest ads on a schedule. The manual habit is simple and worth building: bookmark the competitor's Page in the Meta library and their advertiser page in the Google center, then re-check every week or two, sorted so the newest creatives surface first.

What you're watching for isn't just new ads, it's which new ads survive. An ad that's still live after 30, 60, or 90 days has earned its budget; a creative that vanishes after a week didn't. Track the survivors and you're watching a rival's testing program in real time. The steady churn of fresh creative is that fatigue curve in action, brands rotate because the same video stops converting, so a sudden burst of new hooks usually means the old angle wore out.

The automation option skips the calendar reminder. You can set your AI assistant to pull your top competitors' newest ads on a schedule and flag what changed, so the check-in comes to you instead of you remembering to do it. Same read, less discipline required.

When should you graduate from manual digging to a tool?

Graduate the moment the manual method starts costing you more time than the insight is worth, usually when you're tracking more than a handful of competitors, across more than one platform, every week. For a one-off look at a single brand, the free library is faster than any setup. The tipping point is repetition and breadth: many rivals, multiple platforms, on a recurring basis.

Does watching the competition make better marketers or just faster copycats?

Does watching the competition make better marketers or just faster copycats? The honest answer is that it can go either way, and the tools won't decide for you. Ad transparency was built for public accountability, not for one brand to reverse-engineer another's creative, the Meta Ad Library and the LinkedIn Ad Library exist so that anyone can see who's paying to influence a market, a civic goal that happens to double as a competitive goldmine. A rival's longest-running ad is a confession about what's converting, and reading it teaches you what an audience responds to. Copying it frame-for-frame teaches you nothing and dulls the market into sameness. The skill was never in seeing the ad, it's in interpreting why it works and building something truer to your own brand. That distinction is the whole difference between research and imitation, and it's one no library will draw for you.

So where does this leave your competitor research?

The libraries were always free. The only thing that ever cost you was the time to read them: the tab-switching, the Page-name gotchas, the muted video thumbnails you never actually watched. That's the real bottleneck, and it's the part worth taking back. Knowing how to spy on competitors ads by hand is a genuine skill, and as of 2026 it's more open than it's ever been, with LinkedIn and TikTok finally in the mix alongside Meta and Google. Learn the manual method; it makes you a sharper reader of what you find. Then, once the clicking outgrows its usefulness, let the question do the walking. Competitor research stops being a quarterly project the moment it becomes something you can ask between meetings.