Moat Ad Search Alternative for Display Banner Ads

Moat Ad Search is gone. Oracle bought Moat in 2017 and shut down its whole advertising business, Moat included, with access ending on September 30, 2024; moat.com now redirects to Oracle's homepage. Moat was a search engine for display and banner ads, so the closest replacement is a tool built on display data: Google's free Ads Transparency Center for one brand at a time, AdEye ($60 a month) for a rival's live Google Display, Search and YouTube ads ranked by run length, or Adbeat ($249 and $399 a month) when you also need modelled spend.

Most pages that rank for this search were written by Facebook ad tools, and they recommend Facebook ad tools. One of them is published by MagicBrief, which itself closed on July 31, 2026. That is a poor fit for the people who actually used Moat. Moat Ad Search was where media buyers, agency planners and display sales teams went to see a brand's banners: the leaderboards, skyscrapers and rectangles it was running across the open web. This guide is for that buyer. It covers what Moat did, which tools now cover display creative, what each costs, and where each one falls short.

What happened to Moat Ad Search?

Moat Ad Search shut down with the rest of Oracle Advertising. Oracle announced in June 2024 that it was leaving the advertising business, stopped signing new advertising contracts, and ended access to all Oracle Advertising services, including Moat Analytics and Moat Reach, on September 30, 2024. Typing moat.com today sends you to Oracle's homepage, and the old search pages are not available anywhere.

Moat started in 2010 as a free search engine for display ads, built on the ad verification technology that was the company's real business. You typed a brand and saw a wall of its banners, with rough first-seen and last-seen dates. Oracle acquired Moat in 2017, and over the following years the free search was squeezed and the paid tier, Moat Pro, sold competitive display data to larger teams. When Oracle exited advertising, both went with it.

What is the best alternative to Moat Ad Search?

The best alternative depends on what you used Moat for. To see a named brand's current display banners, use Google's Ads Transparency Center for free or AdEye for a sortable feed with run length. To see estimated display spend and which publishers a brand buys, use Adbeat or AdClarity. To verify viewability and invalid traffic on your own campaigns, which was Moat Analytics, you need a verification vendor, not an ad search tool.

Google Ads Transparency Center, the free first stop

Google publishes the ads of every verified advertiser in its Ads Transparency Center, including image and HTML5 display ads served through Google's network. Search a brand or its domain, set the format filter to images, and you see the banners Google has approved for it, with the date range each was shown. It is the closest thing left to Moat's free search box. The limits show up when you do this weekly for several rivals: there is no way to rank ads by how long they ran, nothing to save, and no alert when a new banner appears. Our page on the Google Ads Transparency Center walks through what it shows and what it leaves out.

AdEye, for a rival's live display creative

AdEye reads that same Google record and turns it into research you can repeat. Type a competitor's domain and you get its live Display banners alongside its Search text ads and YouTube video in one feed, each with a first-seen date and a run length, and the longest runners sorted to the top. A banner a brand has kept paying for since spring is a better guide to what works than a wall of every creative it ever tested. You can enter up to five rival domains at once, save ads to a board per client, and add brands to a watch list that emails you new ads once a day on the paid plans. Plans cost $60, $99, $300 or $600 a month for 500 to 20,000 searches, or $30 to $300 a month billed yearly, after a one-time demo of 10 searches. The display ads spy tool page shows the workflow in detail.

The honest gap: AdEye covers Google's network only. If a brand buys display directly from publishers or through a non-Google exchange, those placements are not in Google's record, and AdEye does not list which sites a banner appeared on or estimate what it cost.

Adbeat, for publishers and networks

Adbeat is the closest paid match to Moat Pro. It tracks display and native ads across publishers and ad networks, so you can see where a brand's banners ran, not only what they looked like. Standard costs $249 a month and Advanced $399, and only the quoted Enterprise tier includes estimated ad spend. There is no free trial on its pricing page. Our Adbeat pricing breakdown covers what moves between the tiers.

AdClarity, for spend estimates in one market

AdClarity estimates display, video and social ad activity from a panel of users and sells it by market and channel. Published plans are $129, $289 and $349 a month, each with one market and one seat, and Semrush bundles a limited version into its $220 Advertising Pro plan. It suits a team that needs a share-of-spend view in one country and accepts that the numbers are modelled. See our AdClarity pricing guide for the limits on each tier.

Is there a free alternative to Moat Ad Search?

Yes, for the basic lookup. Google's Ads Transparency Center is free and shows the display ads of any verified Google advertiser, and Meta's Ad Library is free for Facebook and Instagram ads. Neither ranks ads by run length, saves research or alerts you to new creative, so teams that check rivals every week usually add a paid tool on top of them.

What did Moat do that no single tool replaces?

Moat sat across two jobs that are now sold separately. Moat Ad Search and Moat Pro answered "what is this brand running", which is competitive creative research. Moat Analytics answered "were my own ads seen by real people", which is verification: viewability, invalid traffic and attention metrics on your own campaigns. When Oracle exited, most large Moat Analytics customers moved to the big verification vendors. None of the ad search tools above measure your own campaign quality, and none of the verification vendors show you a competitor's banners. If you used both halves, budget for two tools.

The second gap is the open web outside Google. Moat saw banners across a wide range of sites because its tags sat on so many of them. Today, Google's record covers what runs through Google's network, which is most small and mid-size advertisers but not every direct publisher deal. Adbeat and AdClarity estimate a wider slice of the market, at a higher price.

Which Moat alternative is best for agencies?

For an agency that used Moat to prepare pitches and competitive reports, the practical stack is AdEye for each client's rival creative and Auction Insights in the client's own Google Ads account for who they meet in the auction. Keep one AdEye board per client so research never mixes, and export the board to CSV on the paid plans for the deck. Pull performance numbers for your own campaigns into a single cross-channel marketing dashboard, so the competitor slide and the results slide come from the same week. Add Adbeat only for clients whose rivals spend heavily on open-web display, where publisher placements change the media plan.

How to rebuild your Moat research workflow

1. List the brands you used to check. Moat saved nothing you can export now, so start from memory, old decks or client briefs. Write down each rival's website domain, because every tool above works from the domain.
2. Run each domain through Google's record. Use the search box at the top of this page or the Transparency Center. In AdEye, enter up to five domains at once, separated by commas, and read them in one feed.
3. Start with the long runners. Sort by run length and look at the banners each brand has kept live for months. Note the offer, the visual style and the sizes it uses.
4. Save what matters. Ordinary commercial ads drop out of public view once they stop running, so save the banners you want to keep to a board per client or per category.
5. Set alerts instead of rechecking. Add each rival to a watch list on a paid plan and AdEye emails you new ads once a day, which replaces the habit of searching Moat by hand every Monday.

Is Moat Pro still available?

No. Moat Pro was part of Oracle Advertising, and Oracle ended all advertising services on September 30, 2024. Some enterprise customers may still hold exports from before the shutdown, but nobody updates that data. For current competitor display creative, use Google's Ads Transparency Center, AdEye, Adbeat or AdClarity, depending on whether you need the ads themselves or modelled spend.

Is MagicBrief a Moat alternative?

Not any more. Several roundups for this search still list MagicBrief, but MagicBrief shut down on July 31, 2026, and it was a social creative tool rather than a display banner search. Our MagicBrief alternative page covers where its users went.

If you want to see what a competitor is running on display right now, type its domain into the search box at the top of this page. The demo shows its live Google banners, text ads and YouTube video in one feed, longest runners first, before you pay anything. For a broader look at display research, our guide to finding competitor display ads covers the manual methods too. Moat was not the only display research tool to disappear; our WhatRunsWhere alternative guide covers the affiliate and native side.