Spy on competitors · Google Ads Competitor Analysis

Google Ads competitor analysis tool and AdWords intelligence

Most Google Ads competitor analysis stops at a keyword list somebody else modeled. That list is a guess. No tool on the market reads a competitor's Google Ads account, so every keyword, CPC and spend figure you have ever been shown was inferred backwards from scraped search results.

There are two sources that are not guesses. Auction Insights, inside your own Google Ads account, tells you exactly which advertisers you share an auction with, because Google reports it from the auction itself. Google's Ads Transparency Center tells you exactly what those advertisers are saying, because it publishes their own approved creative. Neither one is an estimate. Between them you get the who and the what, and that is the part of a competitor analysis you can put in front of a client without a disclaimer.

AdEye sits on top of the second source. Type a competitor's domain and you get their live Google ads in one feed, Search text, Shopping listings, Display banners and YouTube video, each with how long Google says it has been running. AdEye covers Google only, and CSV export is available 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.

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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 Google Ads competitor analysis can actually tell you

The half of the analysis that is evidence

Split every question you have about a competitor into two piles. Pile one can be answered from a primary source: which advertisers you compete with, what their ads say right now, which surfaces they run on, and how long each creative has survived. Pile two cannot: their keyword list, their bids, their monthly budget, their return on ad spend. Pile one comes from Auction Insights and the Ads Transparency Center and is reportable as fact. Pile two comes from models, and the honest way to use it is as a direction to investigate, never as a number in a slide. Teams that keep the two piles separate make better calls, because they stop arguing about a spend estimate nobody can verify and start reacting to copy that is demonstrably live.

Run length is the signal the estimates cannot fake

Google stamps each ad in the Transparency Center with how long it has been running. That single field does more work than a modeled budget. An advertiser who has kept the same offer live for eight months has tested it against their own numbers and it survived. A creative that appeared last week is an experiment, and it may be gone by the time you finish reading about it. Sort a competitor's ads by run length and the long-lived ones tell you what is actually paying for itself. Copy the tested angle, not the experiment. This is the closest thing to a public performance signal that Google publishes, and it costs nothing to read.

Search-only analysis misses most of the account

A competitor review that looks at text ads on one search results page sees a fraction of the spend. The same advertiser record shows their Shopping listings, their Display banners and their YouTube video ads together, and for most ecommerce and lead-gen accounts those surfaces carry more budget than plain Search. Performance Max creative shows up here too, which matters because Performance Max is structurally invisible to keyword-based tools: it never ran on a keyword list, so there is nothing for a SERP scraper to infer from. If your read of a competitor comes from a keyword tool, Performance Max is a blind spot you do not know you have.

Auction Insights names them, this shows you them

Auction Insights is the only authoritative answer to who you are competing against, and it is free inside the account you already pay for. What it will never give you is a single line of their ad copy. That is the handoff. Take the domains Auction Insights lists, especially the ones with rising impression share, and look each one up here to see what they are actually saying to the traffic you both want. The workflow takes minutes and it closes the loop that most competitor decks leave open: you finally know both which advertiser is pressuring you and what message is doing the pressuring.

What Google does not keep, and why it matters

Ordinary commercial ads leave no archive. They are visible while they run and they disappear when the advertiser stops them, so a competitor analysis is a snapshot of the present, not a history. Two exceptions are worth knowing. Ads about politics or social issues are retained for seven years with spend and impression ranges. Any ad delivered in the European Economic Area is archived for a year after its last impression under the Digital Services Act, which means a US brand that also runs European campaigns leaves a year of reachable inactive creative. Google publishes no retention window for ordinary ads, and the thirty day figure repeated across the web refers to an advertiser disclosure page, not to how long ads stay searchable.

Side by side

Google Ads competitor analysis: what is evidence and what is a model

Checked August 2026 against what Google itself publishes. Where your own account or a free source is the better answer, this table says so.

What you want to know	Where it really comes from	How far you can trust it
Which advertisers you compete against	Auction Insights, inside your own Google Ads account	Authoritative. Google reports it from the auction. Start here
The exact ad copy a rival runs today	Ads Transparency Center, or AdEye on top of it	Authoritative. It is the advertiser's own approved creative
How long a creative has been live	Run length stamped on each ad by Google	Reported by Google. The most useful free performance signal
Their Shopping and YouTube ads	The same advertiser record, every surface together	Authoritative, and routinely missed by Search-only reviews
Whether they run Performance Max	Creative appears in the transparency data	Visible here. Invisible to any keyword-based tool
Which keywords a rival bids on	Modeled by SERP-scraping tools such as SpyFu or Semrush	Directional only. Useful for ideas, never a fact in a report
Monthly spend and CPC	Modeled keywords multiplied by modeled cost per click	An estimate on top of an estimate. Do not quote it to a client
Ads they stopped running last month	Nowhere, unless the ad ran in the EEA or was political	Unavailable. Commercial ads leave no archive when they stop
Their Meta or TikTok campaigns	Each platform's own ad library	Available there, but not through AdEye. We cover Google only

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 a list of Auction Insights domains into the ad copy each one is actually running
See a competitor's Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube ads in one feed instead of four tabs
Sort by run length to separate a competitor's proven offers from this week's test
Catch a repositioning the day the new creative goes live, not at the next quarterly review
Check whether a rival is running Performance Max creative your keyword tool cannot see
Brief a writer with the exact promises and proof points the market is already reading
Build a competitor section for a client report out of primary evidence, not modeled estimates
Export the creative set to CSV on the paid plans and keep a dated record of what changed

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 google ads competitor analysis

Start in your own Google Ads account. Open Auction Insights on the campaigns that matter and write down the domains you overlap with most. Then look each domain up in Google's Ads Transparency Center, or here, to read the live creative behind the name. Sort what you find by run length, note the offers that have survived months, and only then reach for modeled keyword data as a source of ideas.

Yes. Google runs a public Ads Transparency Center that shows the ads a verified advertiser is currently running, along with the format, the regions the ad has been shown in, and how long it has been live. It is Google's own data about its own advertisers, published for transparency, and it covers Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube creative.

Enter their domain. AdEye queries Google's public advertiser records and returns the live creative in one feed, with run length on each ad. Searching by domain works directly. Searching by brand name takes an extra step, because Google resolves a brand to an advertiser identifier first, and AdEye does that lookup for you.

Google's Ads Transparency Center is free and it is the underlying source. It is built for one-off lookups, so it is slow going if you are reviewing a list of competitors or tracking changes week over week. AdEye adds search across advertisers, sorting by run length, and CSV export on the paid plans. Auction Insights is also free and it is the only authoritative view of who you compete against.

Auction Insights is the answer, and it lives inside your own account. It lists the domains that appeared in the same auctions as you, with impression share and overlap rate, which is information no external tool can derive. Anyone selling you a competitor list built from keyword overlap is approximating something you can already read as fact.

Auction Insights is a report inside Google Ads that shows which other advertisers competed in the same auctions as your ads, and how you compare on impression share, overlap rate, position above rate and top of page rate. It is authoritative because Google generates it from the auction. Its one limitation is that it names advertisers without showing you a single line of their creative.

Not accurately. Nobody outside the account can read a competitor's budget, so every spend figure you have seen is modeled: a tool estimates their keywords, estimates a cost per click, and multiplies. The known blind spots are large. Brand campaigns get under-counted, tightly geo-targeted campaigns are close to invisible, and Performance Max never ran on a keyword list at all.

Only as an estimate. Tools like SpyFu, Semrush and Adthena infer keyword lists by scraping search results at scale and recording which advertisers appear for which queries. That produces a genuinely useful list of themes, and it is wrong at the edges in predictable ways. Treat it as a research prompt, not as a fact you would defend in a meeting.

The Google Ads interface itself does not show you a competitor's creative. Auction Insights names the advertisers and stops there. To see the actual ads you need the Ads Transparency Center, which is a separate public Google product, or a tool built on top of it.

It depends entirely on which half of the tool you are using. Creative data taken from Google's transparency records is exact, because it is the advertiser's own published ad. Keyword, cost per click and spend data is modeled from scraped search results and carries real error, especially on brand terms, narrow geographic targeting and Performance Max.

It is a public Google service that lets anyone look up a verified advertiser and see the ads they are currently running across Google surfaces, with the ad format, the regions it has run in, and the length of time it has been live. Google launched it to make advertiser identity and ad content verifiable, and it is the primary source behind AdEye.

Google publishes no retention window for ordinary commercial ads. They are visible while an advertiser runs them and they disappear once the advertiser stops. Political and social issue ads are a documented exception and are kept for seven years, and ads delivered in the European Economic Area are archived for one year after their last impression under the Digital Services Act.

You can see the creative. Performance Max assets appear in the advertiser's transparency record like any other ad, so you can read the copy and view the images and video. What you cannot get is a keyword layer, because Performance Max was never targeted with one. That is exactly why keyword-based competitor tools miss it entirely.

Yes. Shopping listings appear in the same advertiser record as text and video ads, so you can see the products a competitor is actively promoting, the imagery they lead with, and how long each listing has been running. Reviews that only look at text ads on the search results page routinely miss this.

Check the Transparency Center side monthly for the competitors that matter, and immediately if your cost per acquisition moves without an internal cause. Creative changes fast and there is no archive, so a quarterly cadence guarantees you find out about a competitor's new angle after it has already stopped being new.

Yes. These ads are published by Google in a public transparency service specifically so that anyone can look them up, and the creative was approved for public display by the advertiser. Reading a competitor's live ads is ordinary market research. Copying their trademarked text or their brand assets into your own ads is a separate matter and is not something we advise.

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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