Which platforms are my competitors advertising on?

Almost everything written on this question lists the four ad libraries and then sells you a tool. Nobody publishes the actual answer. So we measured it: across 158 brands we hold qualified ad data for (151 of them UK), only 43 run on Google, Meta and TikTok together. Sixty-three run on exactly one platform. The single most common pattern isn't "everywhere" — it's Meta and nothing else. Here's the full distribution, what it means for your own channel plan, and how to check any specific competitor properly.

The short answer: far fewer platforms than you assume

The instinct when you're planning media is that your well-funded competitor is already on every channel, and you're behind. The data says otherwise. Here's how 158 brands in our database split by the number of platforms they're actively running on, counting Google, Meta and TikTok:

Platforms running	Brands	Share
One only	63	40%
Exactly two	52	33%
All three	43	27%

The average brand runs on 1.9 of the three. Nearly three quarters are absent from at least one major platform entirely — not under-invested, absent. If you're running two channels well, you are already ahead of two-thirds of the market by breadth.

The most common pattern is Meta-only

Break the 158 brands into their exact platform combinations and the ranking is the genuinely surprising part:

Combination	Brands
Meta only	52
Google + Meta	51
Google + Meta + TikTok	43
Google only	11
Meta + TikTok	1

Meta-only (52) narrowly beats the Google-and-Meta default (51). Two further things fall out of this table that are worth sitting with:

• Nothing runs TikTok without Meta. Not one brand in the set. TikTok is consistently a third or second addition, never a starting point.
• Google-only is rare (11 brands) and strongly typed. It's almost entirely high-intent, high-value lead-gen and comparison: Compare the Market, Direct Line, Marshmallow, We Buy Any Car, National Accident Helpline, ADT, Victorian Plumbing. These are businesses buying demand at the moment of search, where a social feed placement does much less work.

Meta-only, by contrast, is the broadest and most varied group — grocery and retail (Asda, Co-op), furniture (Furniture Village, Bensons for Beds, Hammonds), charity (Battersea, Barnardo's, Guide Dogs), fintech (Chase UK, Chip, ANNA Money, Capital on Tap) and a long tail of smaller DTC brands. The common thread is that Meta is the cheapest place to buy reach and test creative, so it's where brands start and often where they stay.

Sector predicts platform mix better than brand size does

The three-platform brands aren't simply the biggest advertisers. They cluster by category. Two sectors in our set make the point:

Sector	Brands tracked	On all three
Charity	8	5
Insurance	8	0

Five of eight charities — British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Dogs Trust, Macmillan, RNLI — run Google, Meta and TikTok simultaneously. Not one of the eight insurance brands does. Insurance lives on search intent and price comparison; charity fundraising needs emotional reach and a young donor pipeline, which is exactly what TikTok plus Meta buys. Home improvement lead-gen (7 brands, 0 on all three) and beauty (7 brands, 0 on all three) likewise stay narrow.

The practical read: before you benchmark yourself against a competitor's channel count, check whether your sector has a structural reason to be narrow. A mattress brand on two platforms and a charity on two platforms are not in the same position.

Ad volume concentrates where presence doesn't

Presence and volume tell different stories. Here are the qualified ads we hold by platform:

Platform	Qualified ads	Brands present
Google	30,466	105
Meta	15,214	147
TikTok	5,151	44

Meta has the widest brand presence (147 of 158) but Google has double the creative volume from fewer brands. That's a structural difference in how the two platforms work: a Google advertiser generates large numbers of text and responsive variations per campaign, where a Meta advertiser runs fewer, heavier creative units. Do not read Google's higher ad count as higher spend or higher commitment — it's largely an artefact of variation mechanics. It's the same reason raw ad counts make a poor competitive metric, which we go into in how many ads competitors actually run.

Our TikTok figure covers 44 brands, and 820 of those 5,151 ads aren't yet attributed to a specific brand in our data, so the brand-level analysis above uses the attributed set. We also hold 1,712 LinkedIn ads, but none have been through our qualification pass yet, so LinkedIn is excluded from the three-platform maths entirely rather than quietly folded in. If you're B2B, treat the numbers here as covering three of your four relevant channels.

How to check a specific competitor yourself

The free libraries will answer this for one brand in about ten minutes. Each platform runs its own, and you need to check all of them individually — there is no combined view:

1. Google — adstransparency.google.com. Search the advertiser name, set region to United Kingdom. Covers Search, YouTube, Display and Gmail.
2. Meta — facebook.com/ads/library. Set country to UK, category to "All ads", then search the brand. Covers Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network, so a result here doesn't tell you which of the four. To separate the Instagram slice specifically, use the Instagram ad library method.
3. TikTok — library.tiktok.com/ads. UK, EEA and Switzerland only, by regulatory obligation.
4. LinkedIn — linkedin.com/ad-library. Ads from June 2023 onward.

Our step-by-step walkthrough of all four, with the quirks of each interface, is in how to check competitor ads for free.

Why the manual check under-reports — and how to avoid the trap

Doing this by hand gives you a reliable yes, but an unreliable no and a badly unreliable "how much". Four specific failure modes:

• Google's retrieval cap. The Transparency Center silently stops paginating at roughly 900 creatives per advertiser. For any large advertiser you are seeing a truncated slice and the interface doesn't tell you. We documented this with real counts in why the Transparency Center is missing ads.
• Name and entity mismatch. Brands advertise under legal entities, regional subsidiaries and agency accounts. A search for the trading name can return nothing while the ads run under something else entirely. An empty result is weak evidence of absence.
• Libraries show live ads, not history. Google and Meta surface what's running now. A competitor who ran TikTok hard last quarter and paused looks identical to one who has never touched it. Single-point checks can't distinguish a channel exit from a channel absence.
• Timing. New ads take one to three days to appear. Check a launch too early and you'll conclude they're not on the platform.

The fix isn't a cleverer search. It's checking the same brands repeatedly over time and recording what you saw, so that absence accumulates evidence instead of resting on one look. That's the difference between a spot check and monitoring.

What to do with the answer

Once you know a competitor's platform mix, the useful move is reading it as a strategy statement rather than a scoreboard:

• They're Meta-only and you're Google-only. You're not competing in the same auction at all. They're building demand, you're harvesting it. Both can work; the risk is that they own the consideration stage and you only ever meet the customer at the end of it.
• They've just appeared on a third platform. That's the highest-signal event in this whole analysis. A brand adding TikTok to an established Google-plus-Meta setup has usually found their unit economics work and is buying incremental reach. Worth knowing within a week, not a quarter.
• They're on all three and you're on one. Check the creative before you panic. Brands frequently run one platform seriously and two as low-budget placeholders. Volume and creative refresh rate tell you which.
• Nobody in your sector is on TikTok. That's either a real structural reason (regulated categories, older audience) or an unclaimed channel. The insurance and beauty patterns above are the former; worth working out which yours is.

For a worked example of reading a single brand's full creative strategy rather than just its channel list, see competitor ad analysis.

Where our numbers come from

AdRival tracks live ads across Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, and runs each creative through an AI qualification pass that extracts the offer, discount, hook, audience, urgency and fourteen other fields. The figures on this page come from that database as of November 2026: 158 brands with at least one qualified ad attributed to them, 50,831 qualified creatives across the three platforms analysed.

You can see the per-platform breakdown for individual brands on our brand pages — each shows live qualified ads and platform stats. The three-platform brands make the clearest examples: Pets at Home, ASOS, Monzo, Screwfix and Gymshark all run Google, Meta and TikTok simultaneously, and comparing their creative across the three is the fastest way to see how the same brand changes its message by platform.

If you'd rather not run the four-library check by hand every week, that's what we sell: a one-off report for a single brand, or ongoing tracking that flags new creative and platform changes as they happen. If you would rather do it manually, the guides linked above tell you everything we know about doing it properly — including the bits that don't work.

Related reading: ad spy tools compared for the paid options and what each actually covers, and finding a competitor's winning ads for working out which of their creatives are carrying the budget.