Spy on competitors · Ad Library Alternative

Facebook Ad Library alternative: Meta ad library search

People look for a Facebook Ad Library alternative for one reason above all others: the ad they wanted to study is gone. Meta shows ordinary commercial ads while they are running. Stop the ad, and it drops out of the default library results. There is no public archive of paused commercial creative to go back to.

That single design choice breaks the job most marketers are hiring the tool for. You cannot see how long a competitor ran something, what they killed after four days, or what quietly ran all quarter. You are looking at a snapshot and trying to draw a trend line through it.

AdEye reads the same public ad-library data, but keeps a running record of what it sees. Every ad carries its first-seen date and how long it has run. One caveat up front, because it decides whether this page is useful to you: AdEye reads Google's Ads Transparency Center, not Meta's Ad Library. It does not search Facebook or Instagram ads. Meta's own library is the authoritative and free source for those, so this page is mostly about understanding its limits, and about doing the retained, sortable version of the same job for a brand's Google advertising.

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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

free left ·

See it run

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 Facebook Ad Library alternative has to fix

The ads do not disappear on you

The gap that sends most people looking for an alternative is retention. Meta keeps political and social issue ads for seven years and archives EU-delivered ads for a year after their last impression, but ordinary commercial ads are a live view only. AdEye keeps the ads it has already returned to you, so a creative you saved in May is still on your board in August with its dates attached. It only knows about ads a search of yours surfaced, because nothing reads the library in the background.

Every Google surface, one search box

Meta's library covers Facebook and Instagram. Google runs a separate Ads Transparency Center, TikTok has the Creative Center, and YouTube sits inside Google's. Checking a competitor properly means several interfaces with different search behaviors, and no tool collapses all of them. AdEye reads Google's, which is the one that spans Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube in a single advertiser record. Meta's library stays a separate lookup.

Signals you can act on, not just a wall of creative

A library dumps ads on you in no useful order. AdEye tags every creative by hook, angle and format, and surfaces the signal public data genuinely supports: how long an ad has run. A brand that has run one ad for eleven weeks is telling you something. A brand that posted forty ads yesterday is not.

Side by side

Meta Ad Library compared with AdEye, feature by feature

Retention figures below are Meta's own published policy, checked against the Meta Transparency Center in August 2026. Where Meta's free tool is the better answer, this table says so.

What you are trying to do	Meta Ad Library (free)	AdEye
Look up one brand's Meta ads running right now	Yes, and it is authoritative. Use it	No, use Meta for this
See Google ads a competitor already stopped	Not applicable, Meta only	Only ads you saved to a board; AdEye does not crawl in the background
Know how long an ad has been running	Start date is shown, but there is no run-length view	Run length on every Google ad
Search a brand's Google ads	No, Meta properties only	Yes, from Google's Ads Transparency Center
Political and social issue ad history	Yes, kept 7 years. Better than any third-party tool	Not our focus. Use Meta for this
EU-delivered ad archive	Yes, archived 1 year after the last impression	Not a substitute for Meta's DSA archive
Sort by run length to see what a rival keeps funding	No, no run-length or sorting view	Yes, run length on every ad
See spend, targeting or results	No for commercial ads	No, and no honest tool can
Programmatic access	Ad Library API, approval and a developer account required	No, AdEye is a web app with CSV export on the paid plans
Cost	Free	Starter 39 dollars a month, Pro 99, Agency 299

Neither tool publishes competitor spend, targeting or conversion data for ordinary commercial ads, because Meta does not make that public. Any product claiming otherwise is showing you a model, not a measurement.

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.

Keep saved ads on a board after they stop running
Search any advertiser by brand name or domain
See run length on every ad
Filter by hook, angle and creative format
Sort by run length to see what a rival keeps funding
Save winners to a swipe file on your account
Export a saved board to CSV for a client deck (paid plans)
Public ad-library data only, nothing behind a login

GOOGLE Top performer

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META PLATFORMS, INC. · RUNNING 1,765D

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 platform 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

Every creative is tagged with its hook, angle and format, and a working signal flags the long-runners and scalers, 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 library alternative

Yes. Third-party ad intelligence tools read the same public ad-library data and add what Meta leaves out: retention of ads after they stop running, run-length signals, retention after an ad stops, and saved boards. AdEye does this for Google ads, reading the Google Ads Transparency Center. It does not search Meta, so Meta's own library stays the source for Facebook and Instagram.

Two reasons. First, ordinary commercial ads appear only while they are actively running, so anything a brand paused has left the default results. Second, the library indexes ads to the Page that ran them, so a brand advertising under a different Page name, a regional Page or a partner Page will not surface under the name you searched.

It depends entirely on ad type. Political and social issue ads are kept for seven years. Ads delivered in the EU are archived for one year after their last impression, under the Digital Services Act. Ordinary commercial ads have no published archive window: they are shown while active and drop out of default results afterward.

Not through Meta, for ordinary commercial ads. Meta publishes no historical archive for them. If an ad ran in the EU you can often still reach it within a year of its last impression, and political ads stay for seven years. For everything else you need a tool that recorded the ad while it was live.

Yes, completely, and no Facebook account is needed to browse it. That is exactly why an alternative has to earn its cost on something other than access. What you pay a third-party tool for is retention, tagging and run-length history, not for a view of data Meta already gives away.

The library is a compliance and transparency product: it answers who is running this ad right now. An ad spy tool is a research product built on the same public data, so it answers what has this brand been running, for how long, on which platforms, and what changed since last month. Same source, different job.

Only for political and social issue ads, which carry spend ranges and impression ranges by law. Commercial ads show no spend, no impressions, no clicks and no results. Any tool that displays a spend figure for an ordinary ecommerce ad is estimating from a model, not reading a published number.

Yes, keyword search exists, but it matches ad text and Page names rather than the visual content, and results skew toward whatever is live at that moment. It is workable for a quick check on one brand and painful for tracking a category over time, which is where most people hit the wall.

Usually one of four things: they have no ads running today, they advertise under a Page name that differs from their brand name, their ads are running in a country you have not selected, or Page transparency is limited for that Page. Country filter and exact Page name are the two worth checking first.

Yes. The library covers ads across Meta technologies, so Facebook and Instagram placements both appear, and an ad running on both shows once with its placements listed. AdEye does not read that library, so for Instagram creative the Meta library is the tool. AdEye covers the same brand's Google advertising.

It depends on the platform mix you actually buy. If you run Meta only and want the largest searchable Meta archive, AdSpy is the usual answer. If Google Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube are where you want retained history and run-length signals, that is what AdEye is built for. If you buy native and display, Adbeat or AdPlexity fit better than either.

There is no official bulk download or export button. You can open an individual ad and save the creative manually, and approved developers can pull structured data through the Ad Library API. Anything offering one-click bulk downloads is scraping, which sits outside Meta's terms.

No, and it would be dishonest to claim it does. Meta's library is the authoritative record of what is live and the only complete source for political ad history and the EU archive. AdEye is a research layer over Google's ad transparency data: retention, tagging and run-length signals. It does not read Meta at all, so if Facebook and Instagram are what you need, Meta's library is the tool.

Meta's Ad Library API requires a developer account, identity verification and approval, and it is limited to the data Meta chooses to expose. AdEye reads Google's public ad records into a normalised feed you work with in the app, and you can export a saved board to CSV on the paid plans. It has no API of its own, and it does not cover Meta.

Not from Meta, which has no notification feature at all, and not from AdEye either, which does not send notifications today. What AdEye gives you instead is the run length on every Google ad it reads, so when you do check, you can see how long an advertiser has been funding something rather than only that it exists.

For political and social issue ads, yes, in broad terms. For ordinary commercial ads, no. Audience, interests, lookalikes, placements and exclusions are all private. You can sometimes infer a target from the creative and the copy, but that is your inference, not published data.

Reading public ad-library data is legal, and Meta publishes it specifically so people can look. The line worth respecting is how the data is obtained: reading published transparency data is fine, and copying a competitor's creative wholesale raises copyright questions regardless of which tool you used to find it. Study the angle, not the asset.

The market runs roughly from 30 dollars a month at the low end to several hundred for enterprise coverage. AdEye is 39 dollars a month on Starter, 99 on Pro and 299 on Agency, with a discount on yearly billing. Meta's library costs nothing, so the question is whether retention and cross-platform search are worth a subscription to you.

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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