Spy on competitors · Ad Intelligence

Digital advertising intelligence and ad intelligence tools

Digital advertising intelligence is sold as one category and is really two. One half is observed: the actual creative a company is running right now, published by the ad platforms themselves and checkable by anyone. The other half is modelled: spend estimates, share of voice, CPM benchmarks and audience profiles, reconstructed from panels and inference. Both are useful. They are not equally reliable, and a quote-only price rarely tells you which half you are buying.

Nobody reads a competitor's ad account. Every spend figure and every share of voice percentage in this category is inferred from the outside, which means it carries predictable blind spots: brand campaigns get under-counted, tightly targeted geographies vanish, and budget that never ran against a keyword list is structurally invisible. Ask any vendor which of their numbers are measured and which are estimated before you sign anything.

AdEye sits on the observed side. It reads Google's Ads Transparency Center, so you get the real ads a verified advertiser is running on Search, Display, Shopping and YouTube, each stamped with how long it has been running. Paste a competitor domain above. AdEye covers Google only, and CSV export is on the paid plans.

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Public Google Ads Transparency data. Nothing behind a login.

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Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for that search. Google indexes ads by advertiser, so the brand's exact domain works best, for example nike.com.

Google Ads Transparency has no ads on record for . That is an answer about the brand, not a problem with the search: they are not running Google ads that Google publishes, or they advertise under a different registered name.

We could not reach Google Ads Transparency just now, so this is not a result about that brand, we simply could not look. Please try again in a moment. This search has not been counted against your allowance.

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Live Google Ads Transparency data · Run length · Public data only

GOOGLE ADS TRANSPARENCY

Run length on every ad

AI-tagged hooks & angles

Why it works

What digital advertising intelligence measures, and what it only estimates

Observed and modelled data cost the same and are not the same thing

This is the distinction that decides whether a platform is worth its price, and almost no vendor page draws it for you. Observed data is a record of something that demonstrably happened: this advertiser ran this ad, on this network, starting on this date. The ad platforms publish it themselves, so it can be checked. Modelled data is an estimate produced by sampling and inference: how much that advertiser probably spent, what share of the category they probably hold, what the CPM probably was. A good model is genuinely valuable for sizing a market and useless for settling an argument about a specific campaign. The practical test when you are evaluating a platform is to ask a salesperson which figures on the dashboard are counted and which are estimated. A vendor that answers plainly is telling you something good about the rest of the product. One that treats the question as hostile has answered it anyway.

Run length is the closest thing to a free performance signal

You cannot see a competitor conversion rate, and no amount of money buys it. What you can see, at zero cost, is how long they have been willing to keep paying for a particular ad. That single number does more honest work than most estimated metrics. Advertising budgets get reviewed, underperforming creative gets cut, and an ad that has been running for eight months has survived that review repeatedly. Sort any competitor library by run length and the top of the list is their tested message. The short-lived ads matter for the opposite reason: they map the angles this competitor already tried and abandoned, which saves you a quarter of rediscovering them at your own expense. This is why the observed half of advertising intelligence often beats the modelled half for day-to-day decisions, even though the modelled half is what gets sold at enterprise rates.

What ad intelligence platforms charge, and what actually drives the price

Published entry prices in this category run from nothing to a few hundred dollars a month, and quoted enterprise contracts run far above that. The variable is almost never the quality of the creative data, because much of that data comes from the same public libraries everyone else reads. What you pay for is scope: how many geographic markets you can look at, how many channels, how far back the history goes, how many seats, and how many rows the paid plans allow you to export. AdClarity, to take a concrete example, publishes plans at 129, 289 and 349 dollars a month, and all three of them include exactly one market and one seat. Adbeat opens at 249 dollars a month and puts estimated ad spend behind a call. Read the limits column before the price column. Two plans at the same dollar figure can differ by a factor of ten across a real month of work.

Coverage is per channel, and no single platform covers everything

Advertising intelligence vendors describe themselves in the language of total visibility, and the underlying reality is a patchwork of separate public records with different rules. Google publishes its Ads Transparency Center covering Search, Display, Shopping and YouTube, which is what AdEye reads. Meta runs its own Ad Library for Facebook and Instagram, free to anyone. LinkedIn lists the ads on each company page from roughly the past year. TikTok publishes a curated Top Ads view rather than a searchable archive for the United States. Display and programmatic intelligence vendors add panel-based coverage of networks that publish nothing at all. A platform that covers display well may see no paid search, and one built for search may never show you a video ad. Decide which channel your competitive question actually lives in first, then buy for that channel. Most teams need one paid tool and two free libraries, not one platform that claims all of it.

You search by advertiser, not by industry, and that shapes the workflow

Google indexes transparency data by advertiser, not by topic, and this trips up almost everyone on their first search. Typing a category word such as fintech, logistics or dental returns nothing, because no advertiser is registered under that name. You search by brand or by domain, one company at a time. That constraint sounds limiting and mostly is not, because it forces a useful first step: write down who you actually compete with. If you do not know that list for paid search, the Auction Insights report inside the Google Ads account you already pay for names the advertisers appearing in the same auctions as you. Auction Insights tells you who. It shows no creative at all. The transparency data tells you what they are saying. Running the two together is the whole workflow, and the first half of it costs nothing beyond the account you already have.

Side by side

Ad intelligence tools compared by coverage, entry price and data type

Entry prices were read from each vendor own pricing page between August and September 2026 and are the published self-service rates. Where a free platform library answers a channel better than a paid tool, this table says so.

Ad intelligence source	Channels it covers	Published entry price	Observed or modelled
AdEye	Google Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube	$39 / mo, with a one-time demo of 10 searches	Observed creative only, no spend estimates
Google Ads Transparency Center	Google Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube	No charge	Observed creative only
Meta Ad Library	Facebook, Instagram	No charge	Observed creative, plus spend ranges on political ads
AdClarity	Display, social, video, TV on Enterprise	$129 / mo, one market and one seat	Modelled spend and CPM, plus observed creative
Semrush Advertising	Google and Meta, adds AdClarity on the Pro plan	$99 / mo billed annually	Modelled keywords and spend, plus observed creative
Adbeat	Display, programmatic, native	$249 / mo, estimated spend gated to Enterprise	Modelled spend, plus observed creative
Adthena	Google Search	Quote only for the main product	Modelled share and competitive metrics
SpyFu	Google Search	From $29 / mo	Modelled keywords and spend, ad text history not live creative
Similarweb	Web traffic, with ad intelligence on higher tiers	From $125 / mo	Modelled traffic and spend

What it surfaces

Every ad card carries the hook, angle and a working signal

You type a brand or a domain. AdEye pulls that advertiser's live public Google ads into one feed and AI-tags each creative on the paid plans, so you read the strategy and spot the long-running winners before you save a single one.

Paste a competitor domain and read every Google ad they are running today, on Search, Display, Shopping and YouTube.
Sort by run length so the creative that survived repeated budget reviews separates itself from the abandoned tests.
Check a vendor spend estimate against the ads that are demonstrably running, so you know how much weight the model deserves.
Turn the advertiser names from your own Auction Insights report into live creative you can read the same afternoon.
Watch which offer a rival leads with, a demo, a trial, a discount or a report, and how that has shifted over the year.
Count how many variations sit behind one angle, which tells you how seriously that competitor tests and how much budget backs it.
Brief an agency, a freelancer or a new hire with current competitor creative rather than a slide of famous brands.
Save what is worth reusing to a board, and export it to CSV on the paid plans.

GOOGLE Top performer

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Why AdEye

One feed, the AI read, the working signal in view

Not a stale doc full of screenshots. One query for a brand, the run length on every creative, and a swipe file worth reopening. Public ad-library data only.

Every Google ad at once

The Google Ads Transparency Center searched by brand or domain, so competitor ad research is one query instead of clicking through Google's own viewer.

The AI reads the why

Creatives are tagged with their hook, angle and format on the paid plans, a few per search and kept once read, and a working signal flags the long-runners, so you see why an ad works, not just what it ran.

A swipe file that stays current

Save winners to boards, each keeping its run length and a link back to the original creative on Google, so the file is still useful months later.

Good questions

Questions about ad intelligence

Digital advertising intelligence is the practice of researching what other companies are advertising, where they are running it and roughly what it costs them. In practice it combines two data types: creative that ad platforms publish openly, and spend or share estimates that vendors model from sampled traffic. Only the first type is directly verifiable.

An ad intelligence tool collects competitor advertising into one searchable place. Most read the public ad libraries that Google, Meta and LinkedIn publish, then add features those libraries lack: retention after an ad stops running, run-length signals, saved boards, alerts and exports. The more expensive platforms layer modelled spend estimates on top.

Published self-service plans run from about $29 to $349 a month, and enterprise ad intelligence is usually quoted privately in the low five figures a year and up. AdClarity publishes $129, $289 and $349 tiers. Adbeat starts at $249. AdEye starts at $39 a month, with a one-time demo of 10 searches to try it first.

It depends entirely on which half you mean. Creative data is accurate because the platforms publish it directly, and you can check any single ad yourself. Spend, keyword and share of voice figures are modelled estimates, not measurements, and they systematically under-count brand campaigns and narrowly targeted geographies.

Mostly price and audience rather than data. Ad spy tools sell creative discovery to media buyers and affiliates at roughly $29 to $149 a month. Ad intelligence platforms sell modelled market share and spend estimates to enterprise teams at quoted rates. The underlying public creative is often identical; the modelling and reporting layer is the difference.

Not exactly, and any tool that implies otherwise is overselling. Nobody has access to a competitor billing. Every spend figure sold in this category is inferred by sampling ad delivery and working backwards. Treat those numbers as an order of magnitude for market sizing, never as a fact you would put in a board deck unqualified.

The platform libraries are free and are genuinely the best source for their own channel. Google publishes the Ads Transparency Center, Meta publishes the Ad Library, and LinkedIn lists ads on company pages. They have no retention of stopped ads, no saved boards and no export. AdEye has a one-time demo of 10 searches.

There is no single answer, because the platforms cover different channels. For competitor display and programmatic, Adbeat and AdClarity have the deepest panels. For paid search history, SpyFu and Adthena. For live Google creative without an enterprise contract, AdEye. Decide which channel your question lives in before you compare prices.

Yes. Google publishes every ad served on Search, Display, Shopping and YouTube in its Ads Transparency Center, tied to a verified advertiser. You search by brand or domain rather than by keyword or industry. AdEye reads that data and adds run length, so you can tell a tested message from a two week experiment.

Some platforms do, and AdEye does not. AdEye reads Google data only. For Facebook and Instagram, Meta own Ad Library is free, public and the authoritative source. TikTok publishes a curated Top Ads view in its Creative Center rather than a searchable archive covering the United States.

It varies by vendor and by channel, and the history window is one of the main things tiers are priced on. AdClarity gives 3, 6 or 12 months by plan and reaches back to 2018 only on Enterprise. Adbeat gives 90 days on its entry plan and a year above it. SpyFu advertises more than 18 years of search data.

Reading ads that companies publish publicly is ordinary competitive research and entirely legal. The ad libraries exist because regulators required advertisers to disclose what they run. What is not permitted is copying a competitor protected creative assets or using their trademark in your own ad text in a way that confuses buyers.

Share of voice estimates how much of a category advertising a given brand accounts for, usually by impressions or modelled spend. It is a modelled figure built from sampled data, so it is useful for spotting direction over time and unreliable at precise values. AdEye does not calculate share of voice.

Creative from Performance Max does appear in Google Ads Transparency Center, so you can read the actual ads. What no tool can show is a keyword list behind them, because Performance Max never ran on one. This is why keyword-based competitor platforms tend to under-report advertisers who have moved budget into it.

Live creative data reflects what is currently serving, so it updates continuously as advertisers start and stop ads. Modelled spend and share figures are usually recomputed on a slower cycle, often monthly, because they need enough sampled delivery to be stable. Ask a vendor for its refresh cadence on the specific metric you care about.

If you check two or three rivals occasionally, the platform libraries are enough. A paid tool earns its price when you need history after an ad stops running, run-length signals, saved boards a team can share, or exports. AdEye adds those for Google, from $39 a month, with a one-time demo to try it before you pay.

Mostly paid media teams, agencies pitching or defending accounts, and product marketers building positioning. Agencies are the heaviest users because they need competitive context for several clients at once, which is also why seat limits matter more to them than headline price. Most published plans include exactly one seat.

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Public Google Ads Transparency data only. Nothing behind a login, no private data. Every CTA opens a quick signup, not a checkout.

Live Google Ads Transparency data · Run length · Public data only