Spy on competitors · Competitor Ad Spy

Competitor ad spy tool: view competitor ads on Google

A competitor ad spy tool answers one question: what is this advertiser actually saying to my buyers today. Everything else people sell under that label, the keyword lists, the monthly spend estimates, the share-of-voice charts, is inference stacked on top of scraping. The ads themselves are not. They are the advertiser's own approved creative, published by Google, and you can read them without guessing.

AdEye searches the Google Ads Transparency Center by brand or domain and returns the live creative behind an advertiser, with the run length Google reports on each ad and AI tags for the hook, angle and format. Run length is the part that matters. An ad that has been funded for four months survived somebody's performance review; an ad that appeared last Tuesday is a test that may already be dead. Sorting by that one signal is the difference between modeling a winner and modeling a mistake.

Be clear on the boundary before you buy anything. Coverage here is Google only, across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube from the same advertiser record. Facebook and Instagram creative lives in Meta's own Ad Library and AdEye does not read it. Nobody, including AdEye, can see a competitor's budget, bids, keyword list or conversion data, because none of that is public. Anyone quoting you a rival's exact ad spend is modeling it.

Ad Intelligence Feed

Live Google data

Enter a brand or a domain

Searching the Google Ads Transparency Center...

Try:

Public Google Ads Transparency data. Nothing behind a login.

Open your swipe file

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.

Open your swipe file

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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 a competitor ad spy can honestly tell you, and what it cannot

Run length is the only public proof signal

You cannot see a competitor's conversion rate, so the useful question is which creative they keep paying for. Google reports how long each ad has been running, and that is a spending decision made by someone with access to the numbers you do not have. AdEye surfaces that figure on every creative it returns and lets you sort by it, so the ads that survived months of review sit above the ones that launched this week. It is a proxy, not proof, and a long run can also mean a brand ad nobody bothered to turn off. Read it alongside the offer and the landing page, not on its own.

Observed creative, not modelled numbers

This is the line that separates the honest half of this category from the rest. The ad copy, the image, the video, the display URL and the run length are observed: Google publishes them and they are exactly what the advertiser approved. Keyword lists, cost per click, monthly spend and market share are modelled, reconstructed by scraping search results and inferring backwards. The modelled layer has predictable blind spots, and the biggest is that Performance Max never ran on a keyword list at all, so it is structurally invisible to any tool selling you keyword data. AdEye sells you the observed half and says so.

Ads disappear, so the record is the asset

Ordinary commercial ads have no archive. A creative is searchable while it runs and gone the moment the advertiser switches it off, and there is no request you can file later to get it back. The exceptions are narrow: political and social issue ads are kept for seven years, and any ad delivered in the EU is archived for a year after its last impression under the Digital Services Act. For a US brand advertising to US buyers, neither applies. AdEye keeps the creatives it has surfaced for you with the date it first saw each one, which turns a series of lookups into a timeline you can compare against.

Hook, angle and format tagged on every ad

Reading fifty competitor ads by hand produces fifty opinions and no pattern. AdEye tags each creative it returns with the hook it opens on, the angle it argues and the format it uses, so you can see that a rival has quietly moved from a discount-led message to a guarantee-led one across nine of their eleven live ads. That is a strategy shift you can brief against. The tags are a reading aid rather than a verdict, and you should still open the ads that matter, but they make a large set sortable instead of overwhelming.

Google only, stated plainly

AdEye reads one source: the Google Ads Transparency Center. That covers a competitor's Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube advertising under a single advertiser record, which is the majority of paid spend for most B2B and local advertisers in the US. It does not cover Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, native networks like Taboola and Outbrain, or connected TV. If your competitive question is mainly a Facebook question, Meta publishes its own Ad Library at no cost and you should use that instead of paying anyone. Buying a tool for coverage it does not have is the most common way people waste money in this category.

Side by side

What a competitor ad spy can and cannot see

The category sells observed data and modelled data side by side without labelling which is which. This is the split, so you know what you are paying for.

What you want to know	Where it comes from	Observed or modelled
The exact ads a competitor runs today	Google Ads Transparency Center, or AdEye on top of it	Observed. It is the advertiser's own approved creative
How long each ad has been running	Google reports it on the creative	Observed. A real spending decision, though not a conversion rate
The hook, angle and format of each ad	AdEye tags the creative it returns	Observed creative, interpreted. Treat tags as a reading aid
Which rivals you actually compete with in the auction	Auction Insights inside your own Google Ads account	Observed, and free. It shows no creative at all
A competitor's keyword list	SpyFu, Semrush and similar, by scraping search results	Modelled. Blind to Performance Max and narrow geo targeting
A competitor's monthly ad spend	Adbeat, Sensor Tower and similar, at their top tiers	Modelled. No vendor can read a rival's billing
A competitor's conversion rate or ROAS	Nowhere. It is not public	Neither. Anyone quoting it is guessing
Facebook and Instagram creative	Meta Ad Library, free and public	Observed, but AdEye does not read it. Use Meta's own tool

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.

Look up any advertiser's live Google ads by brand name or domain
Sort a competitor's creative by how long each ad has been funded
Read the hook, angle and format behind every ad without watching all of them
Spot the week a rival changed message, offer or landing page
Pull the actual ad copy a competitor approved, not a paraphrase of it
Build a dated swipe file so this quarter has something to compare against
Brief a designer or copywriter from real competitor creative instead of memory
Send a client the ads their competitors are running, with CSV export 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 competitor ad spy

Search the advertiser by domain in the Google Ads Transparency Center, which is free and needs no account, then read every live creative and the run length on each. AdEye does the same search and adds sorting by run length, hook and angle tags, and a saved dated record so you can compare against your next check.

It is software that collects the ads a competitor is publicly running and makes them searchable and sortable. The honest ones surface creative that platforms already publish. The rest add estimated keywords, spend and market share, which are modelled from scraped search results rather than read from anyone's account.

Yes. Ad libraries are published deliberately by Google and Meta for public inspection, and reading a competitor's ads is ordinary market research. What is regulated is what you do next: Google restricts using a rival's trademark in your ad text where the use is confusing, though not as a keyword.

Use the advertiser's domain rather than their brand name. The Google Ads Transparency Center returns results for a real domain like nike.com directly, while a bare brand word or category keyword usually returns nothing. AdEye handles the brand-to-advertiser lookup for you so either input works.

Not accurately. No tool reads a competitor's billing, so every spend figure you have ever seen quoted is modelled from scraped search results and estimated cost per click. Treat those numbers as a rough order of magnitude for a large advertiser and ignore them entirely for a small one.

Run length is the best public signal. An ad funded for months passed somebody's internal review, while one that appeared days ago is an untested experiment. It is a proxy rather than proof, since a neglected brand ad can also run for a long time, so read it alongside the offer and landing page.

Some sell keyword lists, but none of them read a competitor's account. Those lists are rebuilt by scraping search results, which means they under-count brand campaigns, miss narrow geo targeting, and cannot see Performance Max at all because that campaign type never ran on a keyword list.

You can bid on a competitor's trademark as a keyword, and Google does not restrict that. Google does restrict a trademark inside your ad text where the use is confusing. It also does not restrict a trademark in the second-level domain of your display URL, and it will not investigate a mark that appears only on your landing page.

It depends entirely on the channel you need. For Google Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube creative, AdEye reads the Transparency Center directly. For display and programmatic placements Adbeat goes deeper. For Facebook and Instagram, Meta publishes its Ad Library free and no paid tool beats it for raw coverage.

The range runs from about $29 a month at the entry end to several hundred for display and programmatic data, with enterprise ad intelligence quoted rather than published. AdEye starts at $39 a month for 500 Google ad searches. Compare on channel coverage first, because paying for coverage you do not need is the usual mistake.

Yes, and you should assume they do. Every ad you run through Google appears in the Ads Transparency Center under your advertiser record while it is live, with the same run length data you can see on theirs. Anything you would not want a rival reading should not be in your ad copy.

No. AdEye reads the Google Ads Transparency Center only, which covers Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube. Facebook and Instagram creative lives in Meta's own Ad Library, which is free and public, so use that directly rather than paying for a tool to relay it.

Ordinary commercial ads are visible while they run and vanish once the advertiser stops them, with no public archive. Political and social issue ads are kept for seven years. Any ad delivered in the EU is archived for a year after its last impression, which does not help with a US-only campaign.

They answer different questions and work best together. Auction Insights, inside your own Google Ads account, is the only authoritative source for who you actually compete with, but it shows no creative whatsoever. The Transparency Center is the only source for what those rivals are saying. Neither one replaces the other.

Yes. Ads you save go to a swipe board with the date AdEye first saw each one, so a creative you found in May sits next to the one that replaced it in August. The paid plans include unlimited boards and CSV export if you report to clients outside the tool.

Track the handful whose bidding genuinely moves your cost per acquisition, not everyone in your category. For most advertisers that is three to six advertisers. Pull the list from Auction Insights rather than from memory, since the rivals you compete with in the auction are often not the ones you name in a board meeting.

Read every question we get

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See what your competitors are running today

Type any brand and watch their live ads stream into one feed, AI-tagged with the hook, angle and what is actually working.

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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