How to Find Your Competitors' Ads (Across Every Platform)

To find any competitor's ads, search their brand or domain in the four public ad libraries: the Meta Ad Library for Facebook and Instagram, the Google Ads Transparency Center for Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube, and the TikTok Creative Center for TikTok. All four are open to anyone, need no account, and cost nothing. Rank what you find by how long each ad has been running, because that is the only reliable public signal of which ones are working.

The catch is that none of those libraries was built for research. They exist because regulators required advertising transparency, so they show you the creatives and leave you to work out which matter. Each has its own search box, its own filters and its own blind spots, and none of them publishes what a competitor spends. Last updated July 2026.

Below is the repeatable process: where to look per platform, what each native tool refuses to tell you, and how to turn a pile of screenshots into research that changes a decision.

Start with the public ad libraries

Every major ad platform now runs a public transparency library, mostly because regulators forced the issue. That is great for you, because it means a competitor's active creative is sitting in plain sight. There are four sources worth knowing cold.

• Meta Ad Library. Covers Facebook and Instagram. Search by advertiser (Page) name and you will see every active ad that brand is running, including multiple variations of the same concept. This is the richest source for most DTC and ecommerce brands. Our deeper walkthroughs on how to use the Facebook Ad Library and how to see competitor ads on Instagram cover the search quirks in detail, and the Instagram ad library page narrows the same feed to just the Instagram placements.
• Google Ads Transparency Center. Search an advertiser and see their Search, Display, Shopping and YouTube ads, with rough date ranges and the regions they ran in. Strong for brands that lean on Search and Performance Max. Search by domain rather than brand name, which is the quirk that makes most first attempts return nothing; our guide to Google Ads competitor analysis covers that and the Auction Insights cross-check.
• TikTok Creative Center. The Top Ads section lets you browse high-performing creatives by industry, region and objective, with engagement-style metrics. Less precise per-advertiser than Meta, but invaluable for spotting format and hook trends early; our TikTok Creative Center guide covers its filters and the brand-search limit.
• YouTube ads. Surfaced through the Google Ads Transparency Center and a brand's own channel. Useful for seeing the long-form and bumper creative competitors put real budget behind.

The honest framing matters here: all of this is public ad-library data. You are not hacking anything, scraping behind a login, or touching private account numbers. You are reading advertising that the platforms publish on purpose. Keep your research on that side of the line and you are doing legitimate competitive intelligence.

How to find competitor ads on Meta step by step

Meta is where most people start, so here is the exact flow. Open the Meta Ad Library, set the country, choose the "All ads" category, and type the competitor's brand name. Select their verified Page from the dropdown. You will now see a wall of their active ads.

Two things to look for immediately. First, how many copies of the same concept are running. If a brand has fifteen near-identical variations of one video, that concept is working hard enough to justify iteration. Second, the "started running" date on each ad. An ad that has been live for months is a far stronger signal than one launched yesterday, because brands kill losers fast and keep winners alive. That longevity read is the single most useful free signal you can pull manually.

Write down the brand, the hook in the first three seconds, the angle the ad is selling on, and the format. Do that for their top few concepts and you have the start of a real competitor ad research profile rather than a vague impression. Our framework on how to analyze competitor ads walks through exactly what to read on each creative and how to turn it into a test brief.

Don't stop at one platform

The biggest mistake in competitor ad research is checking only Meta. A brand that looks quiet on Facebook may be pouring budget into TikTok UGC or YouTube pre-roll. To get the real picture you have to run the same brand through all four libraries, which is exactly where the manual approach starts to hurt.

Four tabs, four search boxes, four different layouts, four different ideas of what a "date" or a "variation" means. By the time you have screenshotted everything into a doc, an hour is gone and the competitor has already rotated half their creative. This is the core problem AdEye was built to solve: you type a brand or niche once and it pulls their live public ads from Meta, Google, TikTok and YouTube into a single feed, so cross-platform research becomes one query instead of four manual hunts. You can run it as a proper facebook ads spy tool and a TikTok and YouTube one at the same time.

Search by niche, not just by brand

Knowing one competitor is useful. Knowing the whole landscape is better. Once you have your obvious rivals mapped, search by niche or category instead of a specific Page. "Skincare," "men's grooming," "project management software," "meal kits." This surfaces brands you had not thought of, including the scrappy upstarts who are often testing the freshest angles before the incumbents copy them.

Niche-level research answers a different question than brand-level research. Brand research tells you what one rival is doing. Niche research tells you which hooks and angles are winning across the whole category right now, which is what you actually want before briefing a new batch of creative.

Turn ads into insight, not just a screenshot pile

Finding the ads is step one. The part that pays off is reading them. For every strong creative you find, ask three questions:

• What is the hook? The first three seconds or the headline. Problem call-out, bold claim, founder story, before and after, pattern interrupt.
• What is the angle? The promise it is selling on. Save time, save money, social proof, results, status, convenience.
• What is the format? UGC video, static, carousel, demo, testimonial. Format is often the easiest thing to copy and test fast.

Tag every winner this way and patterns jump out. You will notice that three of your competitors are all running a "tired of X" problem call-out on a save-time angle in UGC, which tells you something the raw screenshots never would. This tagging is exactly what AdEye automates: the AI labels each creative's hook, angle and format and attaches a working signal from how long it has run and how many variations it has spawned, so you read the strategy instead of reconstructing it by hand. If you want to go deeper on the framework, our piece on what makes a winning ad breaks down each element.

Keep a swipe file that does not go stale

The classic move is to save winners into a Google Doc swipe file. The classic problem is that the doc is stale within a week. Competitors pause ads, launch new ones, and scale others, and your static screenshots quietly stop reflecting reality. The whole point of research is to be early, and a stale doc makes you late.

A living ad swipe file fixes this. Save ads to organized boards, and get an alert the moment a tracked competitor launches a new creative or starts scaling one. Now you are not re-running the same four-tab hunt every Monday; the new ads come to you, already tagged. That is the difference between checking on competitors occasionally and genuinely monitoring them.

A weekly routine that scales

Put it together into a habit. Once a week, review the new ads from your tracked competitors, note any concept that has crossed into long-runner territory, and pull the freshest niche-level hooks. Save the best to a board, and tag the hook and angle so your creative team can brief from it directly. Fifteen minutes of structured review beats an hour of frantic screenshotting, and it compounds: over a few months you build a private library of every angle that has worked in your market.

The short version

To find competitor ads, search each public ad library by brand and by niche, read every winner for its hook, angle and format, weight the long-runners heavily, and save it all into a swipe file that updates itself. The native libraries give you the raw material for free. The work is in unifying four tools, reading the strategy, and staying current, which is precisely the gap AdEye closes as a competitor ads extractor that pulls all four libraries into one AI-tagged, alerting feed.

If you would rather skip the four-tab hunt entirely, you can type a brand into the AdEye demo and watch its live ads stream into one feed, tagged with the hook, angle and what is actually working. See the plans when you are ready to track your whole competitive set.