Spy on competitors · Google Ads Auction Insights

Google Ads Auction Insights report: see competitor ads

The Auction Insights report is the only authoritative answer to a question every advertiser asks: who am I actually competing with? It sits inside the Google Ads account you already pay for, it costs nothing extra, and Google builds it from the auction itself rather than inferring it from scraped search results. No external tool can match it, because no external tool has the auction data.

Then it stops. The report hands you a list of competitor domains and six percentages, and that is the whole of it. Not one line of their ad copy. No budget, no bid, no keyword, no creative. You learn that a rival showed up in 63 percent of your auctions and outranked you more often last month, and you are left to guess what they said to win.

That guess is the part AdEye removes. Take a domain straight off the report, paste it in, and you get the Google ads that advertiser is running right now, Search text, Shopping, Display and YouTube together, each stamped with how long Google says it has been live. AdEye covers Google only, and CSV export is on the paid plans.

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

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 the Auction Insights report proves, and where it goes quiet

It is evidence, not a model, and almost nothing else is

Nearly every competitor number sold in this category is inferred. SpyFu, Semrush, Adthena and Adbeat all reach their keyword lists, cost per click figures and spend estimates the same way: by scraping search results at scale and reasoning backwards. Nobody reads a competitor Google Ads account. Auction Insights is the exception. Google generates it from the auctions your ads actually entered, so when the report says an advertiser overlapped with you 63 percent of the time, that is a measurement rather than an estimate. This matters most in a client meeting. You can put an Auction Insights figure on a slide and defend it. A modeled monthly spend figure will not survive the first person who asks how it was calculated.

The six columns, and what each one is really telling you

Search campaigns get six statistics. Impression share is how often your ad appeared out of the times it was eligible to appear. Overlap rate is how often another advertiser got an impression in an auction where you also got one, which is the column that identifies your real rivals. Position above rate is how often their ad ranked higher than yours when you both showed. Top of page rate and absolute top of page rate describe where on the results page each advertiser landed. Outranking share combines ranking above you with showing when you did not appear at all. Shopping campaigns get three of those six: impression share, overlap rate and outranking share. Performance Max is supported too, with the data split by Search and Shopping channels at account and campaign level.

Where the report goes quiet, and it goes quiet often

Google applies a minimum activity threshold, so advertisers who compete with you occasionally never surface at all. If your impression share on a segment falls below 10 percent, Google withholds the insights for it, which is exactly the situation where you most want to know who is beating you. Search partner traffic does not distinguish top of page from other positions, so those columns get muddier the more partner volume you carry. And every advertiser in the list is a bare domain. No spend, no budget, no bid, no keyword and no creative appears anywhere in the report, by design. It is a competitive map with the labels removed.

A rising overlap rate is a question, not an answer

The most common misreading of this report is treating a movement as a diagnosis. Your impression share drops four points and a rival gains six, and the meeting concludes that they raised their bids. Maybe. They could equally have widened match types, added a new geography, launched a Performance Max campaign, improved their landing page quality, or simply written a better ad. Auction Insights cannot separate those causes, because it only reports outcomes. Overlap rate is also not market share and it says nothing about whether the other advertiser is making money. The report is excellent at telling you where to look and useless at telling you what you are looking at, which is why the next step has to come from somewhere else.

The handoff: turning domains into the actual promises

Google publishes the other half of the picture in a different product. The Ads Transparency Center shows the creative a verified advertiser is currently running, and it accepts a domain directly, which is convenient because a domain is exactly what Auction Insights gives you. Copy the rivals with the highest overlap rate, look each one up, and read what they are saying to the traffic you both want. Sort by run length while you are there: an offer Google says has been live for eight months has already been tested against that advertiser own numbers and survived, while last week creative is an experiment. Performance Max creative shows up here as well, which is worth knowing, because Performance Max never ran on a keyword list and is therefore structurally invisible to every SERP-scraping tool.

Side by side

What Auction Insights answers, and where to get the rest

Checked September 2026 against Google own documentation. Where your account or a free Google product is the better source, this table says so.

What you want to know	Does Auction Insights answer it	Where the answer actually lives
Which advertisers share your auctions	Yes, this is its core job	Auction Insights. Nothing else has the auction data
How often a rival appears beside you	Yes, that is overlap rate	Auction Insights, segmented by time and device
How often they rank above you	Yes, position above rate and outranking share	Auction Insights, on Search and Shopping
What their ads actually say	No. No creative appears in the report	Ads Transparency Center, or AdEye on top of it
How long a rival ad has been running	No	Run length stamped on each ad by Google
Their budget, bids or cost per click	No, and Google never discloses it	Nowhere reliable. Every public figure is modeled
Which keywords they bid on	No	Modeled by SERP scrapers. Directional only
Competitors when your impression share is under 10 percent	No, Google withholds insights below that line	Raise share first, or work from the creative side
Whether they run Performance Max	Partly. Your own PMax data splits by channel	Their PMax creative is visible in the transparency data
Their Meta or TikTok activity	No, Google auctions only	Each platform own ad library. Not covered by AdEye

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.

Turn the domain list from your Auction Insights report into the ad copy each rival is running
Check a new name that appeared in the report before your next bid change, not after it
See whether an advertiser gaining impression share also changed their offer or just their bids
Read Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube creative for one competitor in a single feed
Sort by run length to tell a rival proven offer apart from this week test
Spot Performance Max creative that keyword-based competitor tools cannot see at all
Answer the client question that always follows the report: what are they actually saying?
Export a dated creative set to CSV on the paid plans and track how the message shifts

GOOGLE Top performer

image

PATAGONIA, INC. · RUNNING 1,789D

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 google ads auction insights

Auction Insights is a report inside Google Ads that shows which other advertisers competed in the same auctions as your ads. It compares you against them on impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, position above rate, top of page rate and absolute top of page rate. Google builds it from the auction itself, so it is measured rather than estimated.

Open the Campaigns view in your Google Ads account, select the campaigns, ad groups or keywords you want to analyze, then click the Auction insights button. Which levels are available depends on the campaign type. The report covers Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, and you can segment the results by time and by device.

It is not a separate section of the interface. Go to Campaigns, tick the items you want to compare, and the Auction insights button appears above the table. Because you select the rows first, you can run it for the whole account, one campaign, one ad group or a single keyword, depending on the campaign type.

Overlap rate is how often another advertiser received an impression in an auction where your ad also received one. A 60 percent overlap rate means that in six out of ten auctions your ad showed in, theirs showed too. It is the fastest way to identify your genuine competitors, and it is not market share.

Impression share is the number of impressions you received divided by the number you were eligible to receive. A low figure means you are losing auctions you could have entered, usually to budget or to rank. Note that Google withholds Auction Insights data entirely when impression share falls below 10 percent.

Outranking share is how often your ad ranked higher than another advertiser ad in the same auction, plus the times your ad appeared when theirs did not. It combines two things, which is why it can move without your ranking changing at all. Read it alongside position above rate rather than on its own.

Position above rate is how often another advertiser ad appeared in a higher position than yours, counting only the auctions where both ads showed. Unlike outranking share it ignores the auctions you missed entirely, so it is the cleaner read on head to head ranking against a specific competitor.

No. The report contains no spend, no budget, no bid and no cost per click for any advertiser, including you. Google reports relative performance as percentages and nothing else. Any tool quoting a competitor monthly Google Ads spend arrived at that number by modeling scraped search results, not by reading an account.

No. Auction Insights names advertisers by domain and shows six percentages. It contains no ad copy, no images and no landing pages. To see the creative behind a name you need the Ads Transparency Center, which is a separate free Google product, or a tool like AdEye built on top of it.

Because their ads entered at least one auction that your ads also entered, and they cleared the minimum activity threshold Google requires before listing an advertiser. It does not mean they target your keywords deliberately, and it does not mean they are outspending you. Overlap rate tells you how frequently it happens.

Usually one of three reasons. Your impression share is under 10 percent, so Google withholds the insights. Or the campaigns you selected are not a supported type, since only Search, Shopping and Performance Max qualify. Or there is too little data in the date range for any competing advertiser to clear the activity threshold.

Yes. Google supports Auction Insights for Performance Max campaigns, with the data segmented by Search and Shopping channels, available at account level and campaign level. What it will not give you is a keyword view, because Performance Max does not run on a keyword list. For PMax creative, look in the Ads Transparency Center instead.

Yes, with three statistics rather than six: impression share, overlap rate and outranking share. Position above rate, top of page rate and absolute top of page rate are Search only. Shopping also has no keyword level view in this report, so you are comparing at the campaign or ad group level.

Yes, and by the same rules. If your ads compete in their auctions often enough to clear the activity threshold, your domain appears in their report with the same six percentages pointed the other way. Nobody sees anybody budget, keywords or creative, so the visibility is symmetrical and limited.

Run Auction Insights at the keyword level on a Search campaign. That gives you the domains competing for that specific term, which is information no external tool can derive, because it comes from the auction. Then look each domain up in the transparency data to see the ad copy they are running against you.

Yes. It is a standard report inside Google Ads at no extra cost, available to any account meeting the data thresholds. The Ads Transparency Center is free as well. AdEye is the paid layer on top of the second one, adding search across advertisers, run length sorting and CSV export on the paid plans.

Read every question we get

Explore more

More ways to spy on competitor ads

Google Ads Competitor Analysis Tool & Intelligence

Pull every Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube ad a competitor is running from Google's own transparency data, with the run length on each one.

Learn more

Ad Spy Tool Pricing

Every published ad spy tool price we could verify first-party, with the date we checked it and the billing unit each vendor actually charges on.

Learn more

Facebook Ad Library Alternative

Why the Meta library loses paused ads, and what AdEye keeps for Google advertisers instead.

Learn more

See every ad spy tool use case See ad spy tool pricing Back to the ad spy tool

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.

See pricing

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