How to see your competitors' ads (free): Google, Meta, TikTok & LinkedIn

Every major ad platform now runs a public transparency library. You can see almost any brand's live ads — the creative, the copy, when it started running, sometimes where it's targeted — without spending a penny or creating an account. This guide walks through all four tools with exact steps and direct links, then covers what they deliberately leave out.

The four free ad libraries at a glance

Each one exists because of regulation — mostly the EU's Digital Services Act — not because the platforms want you researching competitors. That shapes what they show and, more importantly, what they don't. More on that below.

Google Ads Transparency Center

Google's library covers ads on Search, YouTube and Display from every verified advertiser — and since Google requires identity verification to run ads at all, that's effectively everyone.

1. Go to adstransparency.google.com.
2. Type the brand name into the search box. Pick the right advertiser from the dropdown — big brands often have several verified entities, and similarly named companies from other countries can rank above the one you want. Check the verified name and country before trusting the results.
3. Filter by region (set it to the UK, otherwise you'll see a global blend), by format (text, image or video), and by date.
4. Click any creative to see the ad in full and the last date it was shown.

What you get: the creative itself, the format, the region it ran in, and the last-shown date. In our own data pulls, returned ads span roughly a rolling twelve-month window for ordinary commercial ads. What you don't get: spend, impressions, clicks, landing pages, or targeting.

Caveat: the Transparency Center quietly stops serving results long before it runs out of ads. For Pets at Home in the UK, it reported 3,000 total results but stopped paginating at around 900 creatives. For high-volume advertisers you are seeing a sample, not the full picture — we've documented this in detail in our Google Ads Transparency Center guide.

Meta Ad Library (Facebook & Instagram)

The most generous of the four. Meta shows every ad currently running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network, from any Page, worldwide.

1. Go to facebook.com/ads/library (no Facebook account needed).
2. Choose your country and set the ad category to "All ads".
3. Search the brand name and select the correct Page from the suggestions.
4. Filter by platform, media type (image, video, meme), and active status.

What you get: the full creative, primary text, headline, call-to-action, which Meta platforms it's running on, the start date, and whether the advertiser is running multiple versions of the same ad — which is a strong hint they're split-testing it. If you're browsing from the UK or EU, you'll also see extra transparency data on EU-targeted ads: reach ranges, beneficiary and payer, and targeting parameters.

Caveat: for ordinary commercial ads, the library only shows what's active right now. The moment a campaign is switched off, it vanishes. Only political and social-issue ads are archived long-term (seven years, with spend and impression ranges). If you didn't capture a competitor's ad while it ran, it's gone.

TikTok: Commercial Content Library and Creative Center

TikTok splits transparency across two tools, and they answer different questions.

Commercial Content Library — library.tiktok.com. This is the regulatory library: every ad shown to users in the UK, EEA and Switzerland.

1. Open library.tiktok.com and select "Ads".
2. Set the country to United Kingdom and pick a date range.
3. Search by advertiser name or keyword.

What you get: the creative, first-shown and last-shown dates, the countries it reached, reach ranges, and a summary of the targeting used. No spend, no engagement metrics — and no coverage at all outside Europe, so a competitor's US-only TikTok campaigns simply won't appear.

Creative Center Top Ads — ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter. A curated showcase of high-performing auction ads, filterable by region, objective, format and language, sortable by reach and CTR. Useful for spotting what's working in a category, but it's a highlight reel TikTok chooses to show, not a searchable record of what any specific brand is running. Use the Commercial Content Library for competitor research and the Creative Center for inspiration.

LinkedIn Ad Library

Quietly one of the most useful tools for B2B, because so few people check it.

1. Go to linkedin.com/ad-library — it works without logging in.
2. Search by company name, or by keyword to see every advertiser using a phrase (searching your own category terms is often more revealing than searching brands).
3. Filter by country and date range.

Alternatively, open any company's LinkedIn Page and look for the ads section to browse that advertiser directly.

What you get, per LinkedIn's own documentation: the ad preview and format, the advertiser and payer names, and — for EU-targeted ads — impression ranges and targeting parameters. The library holds ads run since June 2023, and each ad stays for one year after its last impression, which makes LinkedIn the only one of the four where you can reliably see recently stopped commercial campaigns.

What the free tools don't show you

The libraries are genuinely useful, but they were built for regulators, not marketers. Be honest with yourself about the gaps:

• No spend, ever. None of the four shows budget for commercial ads. Impression or reach ranges (where they exist at all) are broad brackets on EU-targeted ads only.
• No performance data. No clicks, no CTR, no conversions. A terrible ad and a brilliant one look identical in a library.
• Patchy history. Meta deletes commercial ads the moment they stop. Google serves roughly a rolling year. You can't reconstruct what a competitor did last Black Friday unless someone recorded it at the time.
• Hard caps on volume. Google's Transparency Center stops paginating at around 900 creatives per query even when it reports thousands of results — for a large retailer that can mean seeing under half of what's actually live. Full breakdown in our Transparency Center guide.
• No cross-channel view. Each library is a silo. To answer "what is this brand's overall paid strategy?" you're manually stitching four tools with four different search interfaces, retention rules and region filters.
• No alerts. Nothing tells you when a competitor launches a new campaign or starts a sale. The libraries only answer questions you remember to ask.
• Geographic blind spots. TikTok's library is Europe-only; Meta's richest data only appears on EU-targeted ads.

Turning raw creatives into strategy

Scrolling a competitor's ads is entertainment. Reading them properly is research. Three things to actually look for:

1. Longevity = winners. Advertisers kill ads that don't perform. Any creative that's been running for months is, by definition, paying for itself — the run dates are the closest thing to performance data the free tools give you. Sort by first-shown date where you can, and pay most attention to the oldest active ads. When you look at a brand like Gymshark, the handful of evergreen creatives that survive month after month tell you more about what converts than fifty fresh tests.

2. New launches. Ads that appeared in the last week or two are where the budget conversation is happening right now — a new product, a new market, a new angle being tested. A cluster of new creatives with the same theme usually means a campaign brief just shipped. Fintech brands like Monzo and Wise are worth watching this way: new feature launches show up in the ad libraries days before the PR does.

3. Promo cadence. Scan copy for "sale", "% off", "free delivery" and deadline language across a few weeks and a rhythm emerges: how often a competitor discounts, how deep, and whether urgency is real or a permanent fixture. If a rival runs "ends Sunday" every Sunday, that tells you how to price against them. If they almost never discount, a genuine sale from them is a signal worth reacting to.

Do this manually with the four free tools and a spreadsheet, and it works — for one or two competitors, checked weekly, in one channel. The tools are free; your time is the cost. When the list of brands, channels and questions grows past what a weekly manual sweep can cover, that's when automated tracking earns its keep.