How to Use the Facebook Ad Library: 6 Steps (Free)

The Facebook Ad Library is the closest thing marketers have to reading a rival's playbook for free, and most of them bounce off it in about five minutes. They open it, search a brand, hit a wall of near-identical creatives, and quietly go back to guessing. That's a shame, because the data is genuinely good, it's just raw and slow to read. This guide walks through how to use the Facebook Ad Library properly: where it lives, how to search it, what you can actually see, how to spot which ads are working, and then the honest fastest way to skip the scrolling entirely.

What is the Facebook Ad Library and how do you use it?

The Facebook Ad Library is Meta's free, public archive of every active ad running across its platforms, and you use it by searching for a brand and reading the live creatives they're paying to run right now. It went public as a searchable library on March 28, 2019, when Facebook expanded it from a political-only archive into "all active ads about anything." You do not need a Facebook account to use it, the library is accessible even if you've never logged in.

A few naming notes, because the labels trip people up. You'll see it called both the "Facebook Ad Library" and the "Meta Ad Library." Same tool, renamed after Facebook became Meta. And it doesn't just cover Facebook; it shows ads running on Instagram too, since both sit under the Meta umbrella.

When it launched, the reaction said a lot about why this matters. One marketer on Hacker News put it plainly back in 2019: "I've personally never seen a public company have such a real time insight into the primary revenue driver." Seven years on, that visibility is still the point, every active ad, free to look at, no permission needed.

Where do you find the Facebook Ad Library and how do you access it?

You'll find the Facebook Ad Library at facebook.com/ads/library, type the URL straight into your browser, no login required. There's no app to install and no account gate, which is part of why it's the simplest way to find a competitor's ads on Facebook. Here's how to get to a working search in under a minute:

1. Go to facebook.com/ads/library in any browser, that's how you get to the Ad Library, no Facebook login needed.
2. Set the country you want to see ads for (this matters, ads are filtered by region, and a brand's US set won't match its UK set).
3. Choose the ad category, "All ads" for everyday competitor research, or the special categories for political and issue ads.
4. Type a brand into the search bar and you're in.

It works on a phone browser if you're checking something quickly, but a desktop is far easier when you want to scan dozens of creatives side by side. That's where most of the real reading happens.

How do you search the Facebook Ad Library for a competitor's ads?

You search the Facebook Ad Library for a competitor by typing their Page name into the search bar, not a keyword, their actual Page name. This is the single most important thing to understand about how to use the Facebook Ad Library, and it's the part most guides skip. Here's the brand-search flow:

1. With your country and "All ads" category set, type the competitor's brand into the search box.
2. Select their verified Page from the dropdown (watch for impersonator Pages with near-identical names).
3. The library loads their full set of active ads, every creative they're currently paying to run.
4. Scroll the set and note the variations: brands often run five or ten versions of the same angle at once.

Now the catch, and it's a real one. Commercial ads are only searchable by Page name. Free-text keyword search, typing "running shoes" and seeing every advertiser pushing running shoes, only works for political and issue ads. Meta said as much in its own launch description: you can "search political and issue ads by keyword or other ads by Page name." Marketers in r/PPC have run into this for years; as one long-running thread put it, the library "isn't great on its own as a keyword search tool, but can be really powerful when you use it with a list of competitor pages."

So the workaround is to build that list first. Before you open the library, compile 15–20 competitor Page names using regular Facebook search, filter by "Pages" and note the exact names. The r/PPC advice here is blunt and correct: "Get a list of 15-20 competitor pages. Products work best." Then run each Page through the library one at a time. It's more manual than you'd like, but it's the only way to get broad coverage out of a tool that won't let you search by topic. Keep that Page list somewhere you can reuse it, you'll come back to the same competitors every few weeks.

What data can you see in the Facebook Ad Library and what is hidden?

You can see every active ad a brand is running and its creative, but not how much they spend or how it is performing. That gap is the thing to set expectations around before you read too much into what's in front of you. Here's the split:

What you can see	What you can't see
The live creative, image, video, and ad copy	Spend or budget for commercial ads
Which platforms it runs on (Facebook, Instagram)	Clicks, likes, shares, or any engagement
When the ad started and how long it's been live	Who it's targeted at (audience, interests, demographics)
The landing destination it points to	Actual performance or results

The limits aren't an oversight you can work around, they're how the tool is built. Mozilla's assessment of the Ad Library API found it "provides no information on targeting criteria" and "doesn't provide any engagement data (e.g., clicks, likes, and shares)." A peer-reviewed study in Internet Policy Review found that even where spend is shown, it appears "only in ranges rather than absolute numbers."

The one exception is political and issue ads, which do carry spend bands and reach ranges, plus a roughly seven-year archive. For the commercial competitor research most marketers are here for, though, you get the creative and the live status. That's it.

How do you tell which of a competitor's ads are actually working?

Watch how long each ad has been running, that's the most reliable free signal you'll get. A creative that's been live for months is one the competitor keeps paying for, and brands kill losing ads fast.

So sort or scan by start date. When you find an ad that's been live for eight, ten, twelve weeks, treat it as a likely winner. That's the closest read you'll get without performance data, and it's surprisingly dependable once you start looking for it.

A couple of other tells worth training your eye on. A cluster of near-identical variants, same offer, slightly different hooks or thumbnails, means that brand is actively testing, which means they care enough about the angle to keep refining it. And when a competitor pours sustained spend into one message for weeks, they're handing you their answer to "what's working" for free.

One honest caveat, though: the library doesn't show you everything. A 2024 Mozilla and Check First stress test concluded Meta has "among the most mature offering" of any platform, and then noted its ad library "still has 'big gaps in data and functionality.'" So don't treat what you find as a complete picture of a competitor's account. It's a strong, free directional read, not a full audit. Honestly, that's still more than most marketers had a decade ago, so I'll take it.

How do you save and organize the ads you find?

Save the ads worth stealing from into a swipe file, a simple Google Doc or Apple Notes board is enough. You don't need a fancy tool to start:

1. Screenshot the creative, then note the brand and how long the ad has been running.
2. Drop it into a dated swipe file so you can spot patterns over time.
3. For video, jot down the hook, there's no native download, and the browser extensions people lean on for this tend to break.

That last point is a known pain. Marketers in r/PPC have complained about losing the extension workflow they used to grab competitor video ads mid-research, more on getting around that shortly.

What are the three Meta Ad Library tools and which one do you need?

Meta actually offers three Ad Library tools, and most marketers only ever need the first one. People assume the library is a single thing; it isn't. Here's the breakdown:

Tool	What it does	Who needs it
Ad Library	The public search tool this guide covers	Everyone doing competitor research
Ad Library Report	Downloadable aggregate spend reports	People tracking political and issue ad spend
Ad Library API	Programmatic access for researchers and developers	Almost nobody on a marketing team

The plain Ad Library is the one you'll live in. The Report is built around political and issue ad spend, not commercial creative. And the API, documented in Meta's Transparency Center, is for researchers pulling data at scale, with the same blind spots as the library (no targeting, no engagement). For reading what competitors are running, you do not need the Report or the API.

Is there a faster way than scrolling the Ad Library?

Yes, the fastest way past the manual scrolling is to ask your AI assistant to pull and read the ads for you. That's what we built Proxy to do. It's a free MCP server that gives ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor real-time access to the Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google, and LinkedIn ad libraries, so instead of opening a tab and searching Page by Page, you just ask. Type something like "show me what video ads Gymshark is running on Meta right now" and you get the active creatives back, read and broken down, inside the chat you're already in.

It maps onto the exact friction points this guide keeps running into. The library can be slow, many marketers in r/PPC describe it taking "forever to load," with queries averaging a few seconds and sometimes pushing ten. Asking your assistant skips the UI entirely. The Page-name-only limitation? Proxy can search Meta by keyword or topic across advertisers, so you're not stuck having to know every brand in advance. And the video problem, no native download, broken extensions, is where it pulls ahead most: Proxy transcribes and breaks down a competitor's video ad, full transcript and hook, with nothing to download. The library simply can't do that.

Now the honest cons. Proxy is MCP-based, so you need an AI client like ChatGPT or Claude to use it, if you just want a one-off glance at a single brand, opening the free library directly is genuinely simpler and faster to reach for. And the free library wins on something real: it's the authoritative source, it's free, and it needs no account at all. Standalone dashboards like BigSpy, Foreplay, or AdLibrary.com are an option too, but they're paid tools you browse in a separate tab, the opposite of staying inside your workflow. Proxy is free to start while it's in beta, no credit card, no API keys.

What this leaves you with

The Facebook Ad Library was always free; the only thing it ever cost you was the time to read it. That's the real trade. The tool hands you a competitor's live creative and then asks you to do the slow part by hand, searching Page by Page, scrolling the wall, squinting to work out which creatives are actually winning. Most marketers do exactly that, and it works. It just eats an afternoon you didn't have. So the question worth sitting with isn't whether to use the library, it's authoritative and free, of course you should. It's how much of your week you want to spend scrolling it by hand, when the answer is increasingly something you can just ask for.