How accurate are competitor ad launch dates?

When AdRival says an ad "went live on 14 August", where does that date come from — and can you trust it? We measured our own corpus of 111,000+ tracked ads so you don't have to take it on faith.

The short answer

Launch dates in AdRival are the platforms' own records, not our guesses. Three of the four ad libraries we track publish a first-shown or delivery-start date for every single ad; one (LinkedIn) publishes none at all — so we show none rather than invent one.

Channel	Ads with a launch date	What the date is
Google	100% (87,288 of 87,288)	Google's first shown date — the day Google first served the ad. Recorded by Google itself; our oldest tracked ads date to 2021, years before AdRival existed, which is the proof these aren't scrape timestamps.
Meta (Facebook, Instagram & co)	100% (12,437 of 12,437)	Meta's delivery start date for that ad. If a brand relaunches an old creative, Meta issues a fresh ad with a fresh date — so the date always means "this run started then", which is what a competitor watcher actually wants.
TikTok	100% (10,526 of 10,526)	TikTok's first shown date, from its ad library.
LinkedIn	0% — by the platform's choice	LinkedIn's ad library does not publish launch dates. LinkedIn ads in AdRival carry no date rather than a fabricated one, and date filters honestly exclude them.

How "still live" and "just stopped" work

Launch is only half the story — the other half is knowing when an ad stops. The platforms differ, so our method differs per channel, and we're open about it:

• Google publishes a last shown date per ad. We treat an ad as live if Google served it within the last 7 days. No inference needed.
• Meta shows only currently-running ads for ordinary commercial advertisers — there's no public "this ended on X" record. So we take a complete snapshot of each brand's active set on every refresh: an ad present yesterday and absent today was switched off between the two. Its end date is the last day we saw it — accurate to our refresh cadence. Every pull is completeness-checked before any ad is marked stopped, so a partial crawl can never falsely kill ads.
• TikTok works like Google: first/last shown dates from the library.

Why this matters when you're choosing a tool

Most ad-spy tools show you creatives. Far fewer will tell you which of their dates are platform records and which are inferences — and a promo alert is only worth paying for if "launched Tuesday" really means Tuesday. Our rule: platform record where one exists, clearly-labelled inference where one doesn't, and a blank where neither would be honest.

See it in practice: every ad card in the AdRival portal carries its launch date, and the library filters by launch window — "show me everything this brand launched in the last fortnight" is one filter. Plans start at £99, and the free sector teardown shows real dates on real ads right now.