How to Find Competitor Ads

Finding competitor ads takes an ad intelligence database, not manual browsing. Which one depends on where they advertise: Facebook and Google have free official libraries, while native, push and most display inventory needs a paid tool because no official archive exists.

To find competitor ads you need an ad intelligence database — a tool that continuously crawls ad networks and archives what runs, where it runs, and which landing page it points to. Manually browsing publisher sites will show you a handful of ads by luck. A database shows you every ad in your vertical across dozens of networks, with the landing pages attached.

Which tool you need depends entirely on where your competitors advertise. The big split: walled gardens (Facebook, Instagram, Google) have official free libraries, while open ad networks (native, push, pop, display) need a paid spy tool because no official archive exists.

The short answer, by platform

The free options, and where they stop

Meta Ad Library

Search any advertiser and see every ad currently running on Facebook and Instagram, with launch dates and creative variants. It is complete for Meta because disclosure is a legal requirement rather than a favour.

Where it stops: it shows the ad, not the funnel. You get the destination link but no archived copy of the landing page, no spend estimate, and nothing about performance. Ads also disappear from the active view once paused, so you cannot study what stopped working.

Google Ads Transparency Center

Covers Search, Display and YouTube ads by verified advertiser, with a date range and country filter. Useful for confirming whether a competitor is running Google at all, and roughly since when.

Where it stops: no landing page capture, no placement data, and no way to filter by vertical rather than by advertiser. You must already know who you are looking for.

Manual observation

Visiting publisher sites in your vertical with a clean browser profile does work, and costs nothing. It is also unsystematic — you see whatever the auction happened to serve you, in your geography, on your device, at that moment. Fine for a sense of the market; useless for coverage.

Why open networks need a paid tool

No native or push network publishes an ad library. There is no Taboola equivalent of the Meta Ad Library, and there will not be one — disclosure obligations apply to political and social advertising on large social platforms, not to content recommendation networks.

So the only way to check which display ads competitors are using on these networks is a third party that crawls them continuously and archives what it finds. That is what an ad intelligence platform is: a crawler fleet plus a searchable archive.

Anstrex, and what it actually does

For native, push and pop inventory, Anstrex is the tool we use. It has been running since 2016 and indexes ads across 27+ native ad networks in 85+ countries, with a database in the region of 14 to 15 million ads.

The feature that matters most

The landing page ripper. Anstrex does not just link to a competitor's landing page — it downloads the full page, assets included, into an inline HTML editor. That is what makes it possible to find all ad landing pages of competitors rather than just the ads pointing at them.

This matters because on native, the landing page is where campaigns are won or lost. Two advertisers can run identical headlines against identical audiences and see completely different results because one built a proper advertorial and the other sent traffic to a form. Seeing the ad tells you the angle. Seeing the page tells you the mechanism.

The rest of what you get

The ad alert system is what turns a research tool into ongoing display ad monitoring. Set alerts on your three main competitors and you learn about their new campaigns as they launch rather than three months later.

What Anstrex does not do

Worth being blunt, because this decides whether it suits you at all.

• No Facebook or Instagram. Those are walled gardens and Anstrex does not cover them. Use the Meta Ad Library instead — it is free and more complete than any third party could be.
• No Google Search. Use SEMrush or SpyFu for that, or the Transparency Center.
• An archive is not live proof. An ad appearing in the database does not guarantee it is running today. Shortlist in the tool, then verify the funnel is live before you commit budget.
• There is a learning curve. Boolean search and the volume of filters take a week or two to use well.

Finding competitor display ads specifically

If you are new to the channel itself, our guide to display advertising services covers formats, costs and targeting first.

Display is the messiest category, because "display" covers programmatic banners, native units and retargeting, all bought differently.

If your competitors buy display through native networks — which most performance advertisers in finance, insurance and health do — Anstrex covers it at a fraction of what the enterprise display tools charge. If they buy true programmatic display through DSPs, Adbeat has better depth and you will pay for it.

If you run affiliate offers specifically, our guide to native ads affiliate marketing covers the funnel and network rules.

A workflow that produces something usable

Most people open a spy tool, scroll for an hour, feel informed and change nothing. This is the sequence that actually converts research into campaigns.

1. Filter by vertical and geography, not by competitor name. You want the market, not one company.
2. Sort by run time, longest first. Ads running 60 days or more are the ones paying for themselves.
3. Collect 20 to 30 long-runners. Fewer than that and you are reading noise.
4. Find the pattern in the angles. Are the survivors statistics, comparisons, news framing, questions? That pattern is the market telling you what works in your vertical.
5. Download the landing pages. Study the structure: how long before the offer appears, what objections get handled, where the form sits.
6. Check the publishers. Placements carrying long-running ads are worth bidding on; the rest are worth blocking.
7. Verify it is live. Open the funnel yourself before you build against it.
8. Set alerts on the advertisers who appear most, and let monitoring run in the background.

Is this legal?

Yes. Ads are public communications, served to anyone who loads the page. Recording what is publicly displayed is ordinary competitive research, and every major agency does it.

Where it stops being fine: reproducing copyrighted creative, copying landing page copy verbatim, using trademarked names in your own ads, or scraping in ways that breach a platform's terms. Study the structure and the strategy. Write your own words and use your own images.

What to use, depending on you

For anyone running native traffic, the calculation is straightforward. A single failed campaign test costs more than a month of Anstrex. If it stops one bad test by showing you the angle was already tried and abandoned, it has paid for itself.

That said, a spy tool is research, not a strategy. It tells you what is running. Whether it is profitable for your offer, at your margin is a question only your own break-even maths can answer.

Tool pricing and feature sets change frequently and review sources disagree on current figures. Verify plans directly with each vendor before subscribing. This guide contains an affiliate link to Anstrex.