WhatRunsWhere Alternative for Display Ad Research

WhatRunsWhere is offline. Pathmatics bought it in 2016, Sensor Tower bought Pathmatics in 2021, and by January 2026 whatrunswhere.com was redirecting to Pathmatics. The site then returned server errors, and the domain registration expired on August 2, 2026. If you used it to see which display, native and mobile ads a competitor or affiliate was running, the closest paid replacements are Adbeat ($249 or $399 a month) for desktop display and native, Adplexity Desktop or Mobile ($199 a month each) for affiliate traffic, and AdEye ($60 a month) for a rival's live Google Display, Search and YouTube ads ranked by run length.

WhatRunsWhere was never a Facebook tool, which is why most "alternative" lists miss the point. It tracked desktop display, desktop native and mobile display ads across the open web, in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia, and it had a toggle that split affiliate campaigns from branded ones. Its customers were affiliate media buyers, display sales teams and small agencies who wanted to know which banners a brand or an offer was running, on which sites, through which networks. This guide is for that buyer. It covers what happened, which tools now cover the same ground, what each one costs, and where each one falls short.

What happened to WhatRunsWhere?

WhatRunsWhere went dark in stages. Pathmatics, a Santa Monica ad intelligence company, acquired it in November 2016 and kept it running as a separate product for smaller advertisers. Sensor Tower acquired Pathmatics in May 2021. By mid-2022 the WhatRunsWhere pricing page no longer listed prices, only a contact form. Archived snapshots show the homepage redirecting to pathmatics.com in late 2025 and January 2026, then returning 503 errors from March 2026. The domain's registration expired on August 2, 2026 and is now in its redemption period, so the site does not load at all.

Pathmatics itself now lives inside Sensor Tower as its digital advertising product, and pathmatics.com redirects there. Sensor Tower does not publish prices; every plan is quoted after a sales call. That is a different purchase from the self-serve WhatRunsWhere subscription most small teams had.

How much did WhatRunsWhere cost?

The last public price list, archived in October 2020, had three plans. Basic, covering desktop and native ads, cost $299 a month or $2,990 a year. Full Coverage, which added mobile, cost $399 a month or $3,990 a year. Enterprise was quoted and added estimated advertiser spend, Facebook and YouTube data, historical trend graphs and unlimited seats. From 2022 the page dropped the numbers and asked buyers to contact sales. So a former customer was paying roughly $300 to $400 a month, which is a useful budget line when you compare the replacements below.

What is the best alternative to WhatRunsWhere?

The best alternative depends on which part of WhatRunsWhere you relied on. For desktop display and native ads with publisher placements, Adbeat is the closest match. For affiliate offers and landing pages on desktop, mobile, native or push traffic, Adplexity sells a separate plan per traffic source. To see the Google Display, Search and YouTube ads a named competitor runs right now, AdEye reads Google's own record for less.

Adbeat, the closest match for display and native

Adbeat is the tool that most resembles the WhatRunsWhere of 2015 to 2020. It covers display, programmatic and native ads, lets you search by advertiser, publisher or ad network, and shows publisher placement URLs and reports you can export. Standard costs $249 a month and keeps 90 days of data; Advanced costs $399 and adds wider filters across ads, advertisers and publishers, three years of history and pre-roll video ads. That lines up almost exactly with what WhatRunsWhere Basic and Full Coverage used to cost. If your job was telling a sales team which publishers a brand buys, start here. Our Adbeat pricing breakdown goes through the tiers in detail.

Adplexity, for affiliate traffic sources

WhatRunsWhere's affiliate toggle made it popular with performance marketers. Adplexity is built for that crowd. It sells each traffic source as its own product: Desktop covers display, banner and pop traffic, Mobile covers mobile web ads, Native covers Taboola, Outbrain, MGID and other networks, and there are separate Social, Push and Adult products. Desktop and Mobile cost $199 a month each, or $166 a month billed yearly; Native costs $249, or $208 yearly. Every plan includes landing pages and redirect chains, which is what an affiliate wants when copying a funnel. There is no free trial, only a demo.

AdEye, for a named competitor's Google ads

Plenty of WhatRunsWhere users were not affiliates. They were marketers and agencies who wanted to see a competitor's banners and copy, and a large share of that competitor's display budget usually runs through Google. AdEye reads Google's Ads Transparency Center and turns it into a feed you can work from: type a competitor's domain and you get its live Google Display banners, Search text ads and YouTube video together, each with a first-seen date and a run length, with the longest runners at the top. A banner a brand has kept paying for since spring tells you more 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 their new ads once a day on paid plans. Plans cost $60, $99, $300 or $600 a month for 500, 2,000, 10,000 or 20,000 searches, or $30 to $300 billed yearly, after a one-time demo of 10 searches. It does not cover Taboola, Outbrain or pop traffic, and it does not estimate spend. Our display ads spy tool page shows the display workflow, and the search box at the top of this page runs a demo lookup.

Sensor Tower, if you were on the enterprise plan

WhatRunsWhere Enterprise customers got estimated spend and Facebook and YouTube data, which came from the Pathmatics side of the business. That data now sits in Sensor Tower's digital advertising product. It is the natural path if your company already buys Sensor Tower app data, but it is sold by quote only and aimed at brands and large agencies. Our Sensor Tower pricing guide explains what is and is not published.

Is WhatRunsWhere still available?

No. The website no longer loads, the domain registration lapsed on August 2, 2026, and there is no self-serve product under that name. Before it went dark the site redirected to Pathmatics, and Pathmatics now redirects to Sensor Tower, so there is no supported way to sign up for the old WhatRunsWhere plans. Any page that still lists a WhatRunsWhere free trial or a monthly price is out of date.

Did Pathmatics replace WhatRunsWhere?

In a sense, yes. Pathmatics bought WhatRunsWhere in 2016 to reach smaller advertisers, and the two products shared data over time. But Pathmatics was always the enterprise product, and after Sensor Tower bought it in 2021 the small-team subscription quietly went away. A former WhatRunsWhere customer who wants a self-serve monthly plan will find Adbeat, Adplexity or AdEye closer to what they had than a Sensor Tower enterprise contract.

Which WhatRunsWhere alternative covers mobile ads?

Adplexity Mobile is the direct replacement for WhatRunsWhere's mobile display data. It tracks mobile web ads and their landing pages for $199 a month, or $166 billed yearly. AdEye shows Google Display and YouTube ads, which run on phones as well as desktops, but it does not separate mobile placements or track mobile ad networks outside Google. For in-app advertising at scale, Sensor Tower is the enterprise option.

How to choose a replacement in one afternoon

Write down the three questions you used WhatRunsWhere to answer each week. If they were "which publishers is this brand buying" and "which networks carry it", trial Adbeat. If they were "which affiliate offers and landers are scaling on this traffic source", book an Adplexity demo for that source. If they were "what is my competitor running and has it changed", run your top five competitors through AdEye's demo and check whether the Google record covers most of what you used to see. Many teams end up with two tools, because no single product today covers everything WhatRunsWhere did at its peak.

Once you have picked winning creatives to test, keep the test itself on a short leash: set real-time budget alerts on your ad accounts so a campaign that starts spending fast does not burn a week's budget overnight. Then come back to the spy tool to see whether the rival is still running the ad you copied, because an ad that disappears after two weeks was probably a failed test, not a winner.

For the wider market, our ad spy tool pricing page compares every major tool's plans, and our guide to the Moat Ad Search alternative covers the other display research tool that shut down recently.