You can see almost every ad your competitors are running right now, for free, in about fifteen minutes. What you cannot see is what they spend. That distinction matters more than any tool you pick, and most guides on this topic quietly get it wrong.
This is the method we use on client accounts, in the order we actually run it.
What competitor ad data is actually public?
Meta, Google and TikTok all run public ad libraries. They exist for political-advertising transparency, and the commercial data came along for the ride. That history explains exactly which fields you get and which you do not.
For any brand advertising on Meta, you can see:
- Every currently-live ad, including every creative variant
- The full ad copy, headline and description
- The date each ad started running
- Which platforms it serves on (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network)
- The destination URL, including their UTM parameters
- How many variants are running under one campaign
What you cannot see, for any commercial advertiser, is spend, impressions, audience size, or demographic breakdown. Those fields exist in the API, but Meta marks each one available only for political and issue ads.
We checked this rather than assuming it
Across 2,108 live Meta ad records covering 21 brands, measured on 5 August 2026, exactly zero carried a spend value. One carried an impressions figure, and it read “0 to 999”.
So when a tool advertises competitor spend estimates, it is showing you a model, not a number Meta published. Some of those models are reasonable. None of them are reported data, and building a media plan on a modelled figure while believing it is measured is how budgets end up defended with fiction. We wrote up the full field-by-field breakdown in what competitors actually spend on Facebook ads.
How to spy on competitor ads, step by step
1. Search the Page name, not the website
Open the Meta Ad Library, set the country to a market they actually sell in, and set the category to “All ads”. Then search their Facebook Page name. This is the single most common failure point: the library indexes Page names, not domains, so typing a website address returns nothing and people conclude the brand has stopped advertising.
If several similar Pages appear, go via the brand’s own Facebook Page, open Page Transparency, and follow the ad library link from there. Regional and product Pages look identical in a dropdown.
2. Sort by how long each ad has been running
This is the whole game, and it is the step most people skip.
Nobody keeps paying to serve an ad that loses money. So the start date is a performance signal that no advertiser can fake and none of them can hide. An ad still running after two or three months has survived every optimisation decision that brand has made in that window.
Ignore anything under a fortnight old. New ads are tests, and most tests fail. The ads worth studying are the ones that have already won.
3. Count the variants
When a brand runs fifteen versions of one concept with different opening lines, that concept is working and they are scaling it. When they run one version of fifteen different concepts, they are still searching. Volume behind a single idea is a confidence signal.
4. Read the first three seconds, not the whole ad
Copy the opening line of every long-running ad into one document. Patterns surface fast: a question, a number, a named objection, a status claim. That list is a competitor’s tested hook library, assembled for free, and it took them real budget to learn.
5. Follow the destination URL
The landing page is half the campaign and it is public. Click through and note the offer, the guarantee, the price framing, and whether the page matches the ad’s promise. A brand running the same ad for six months has a landing page that converts, and you can read it.
Their UTM parameters are visible too, which tells you how they segment campaigns internally.
6. Repeat on Google and TikTok
Google’s Ads Transparency Center covers Search, Display, YouTube and Shopping. TikTok’s Creative Center shows top-performing ads by keyword and industry rather than a complete per-advertiser library. Different advertisers surface on each, and a brand invisible on Meta is often spending heavily elsewhere.
Why can’t I see my competitor’s ads?
An empty result almost never means a brand stopped advertising. In order of how often it happens:
- The country filter is set to where you are, not where they advertise
- You searched a domain instead of a Page name
- The category is still on “Issues, elections or politics” rather than “All ads”
- You picked the wrong Page from a list of near-identical options
- The ads run from a creator or agency Page, not the brand’s own
- The ad stopped, and non-political ads leave the library the moment they do
That last one is worth sitting with. The Meta Ad Library is a live view, not an archive. An ad that ran for a year and ended last week is gone, with no record you can retrieve. Anything you want to keep, you have to capture while it is live.
What to do with what you find
Collecting competitor ads is easy and almost worthless on its own. A folder of screenshots is a swipe file, and swipe files do not tell you why anything worked.
The useful output is a short written answer to four questions, for each ad that has survived a few months:
- The hook. What makes someone stop, in the first three seconds?
- The angle. Which problem is this solving, and for whom?
- The offer. What is the actual promise, and what removes the risk?
- The format. Why this format for this message?
Do that for ten long-running ads in your category and you have a map of what your market has already proven, paid for by somebody else. We ran the full version of this on a category leader in our breakdown of how HelloFresh structures its ads.
Do you need a paid tool?
Not to start. The ad libraries are free and complete for live ads, and the method above costs nothing but time.
What you pay for is one of three things: history the free libraries discard the moment an ad stops, monitoring so you see a competitor’s next move rather than their last one, and analysis so you are reading strategy rather than scrolling screenshots. If you are researching one competitor once, the free route is genuinely fine. If you are tracking a category every week, the manual version stops scaling quickly. We keep an honest, regularly-updated comparison at the tools people actually use for competitor ad research, including where the free options are the right answer.
Is it legal to look at competitor ads?
Yes. Ad libraries are published deliberately by the platforms, the data is public by design, and looking at a competitor’s advertising is ordinary market research. Copying their creative is a different matter and a bad idea regardless: their winning ad is tuned to their brand, their audience and their offer. The value is in understanding why it works, then building your own.
Common questions
Can I see how much a competitor spends on Facebook ads?
No. Meta publishes spend only for political and social-issue advertising. In our own check of 2,108 live commercial ad records, none carried a spend value. Any spend figure you see for a commercial brand is an estimate produced by a model.
How far back does the Meta Ad Library go?
For commercial ads, it does not. The library shows ads that are currently running. Once an ad stops, it disappears, which is why capturing what you find matters.
Can competitors see that I looked at their ads?
No. The ad libraries do not notify advertisers, and there is no view log shared with them.
What is the fastest way to find a competitor’s best ad?
Sort by start date and read the oldest one still running. Longevity is the only public performance signal, and it is a reliable one, because no advertiser keeps funding a loser.
Can I find competitors I do not already know about?
Yes. Search the language of your category rather than a brand name. Ad libraries index the text inside ads, so searching the promise your market makes returns every advertiser making it, including the ones you have never heard of.
The short version
Set the right country. Search the Page name. Sort by longevity and ignore anything under two weeks old. Count the variants. Read the opening lines. Follow the landing pages. Repeat on Google and TikTok. Write down why the survivors work, rather than saving pictures of them.
And do not go looking for spend figures. They are not there, for anyone, and knowing that will save you more time than any tool.
