How to see every Google ad your competitor runs (and what to steal from them)

Your competitor has been testing ads for months and paying for every lesson. You can see the results for free, because Google publishes every ad in the Ads Transparency Center: Search, YouTube and Display, with the dates each ad ran and the countries it was shown in.

Most people never open it. Here is how to use it properly.

The manual way, for one competitor

1. Open adstransparency.google.com.
2. Type the competitor's domain, for example notion.com, and pick the advertiser from the list. Big companies often have several verified advertiser accounts, one per country or product.
3. Pick a country in the top bar. Without it you see ads from everywhere.
4. Switch the format filter between text, image and video.
5. Click an ad to see its versions, the countries it ran in and, for the EU, roughly how many times it was shown.

This works fine for a quick look at one brand. It gets painful when you want 300 ads from five competitors in a spreadsheet, with the ad text you can actually search and sort.

The fast way: pull everything into a table

I built a small tool for this: Google Ads Spy on Apify. You give it domains or advertiser names, it returns one row per ad:

• headline, description and call to action
• landing page URL (where the ad actually sends people)
• the YouTube link for video ads
• first and last date shown, and how many days the ad ran
• countries, and impressions where Google publishes them

{
  "domains": ["notion.com", "clickup.com", "monday.com"],
  "region": "US",
  "format": "video",
  "maxAdsPerSource": 100
}

It costs $1.50 per 1,000 ads with full details, so a full teardown of three competitors is well under a dollar. If you also have a Meta Ad Library API token, the same run pulls their Facebook and Instagram ads.

What to look for once you have the list

1. The ads that never stop

Sort by how long each ad has been running. An ad that has run for 120 days is almost certainly profitable, nobody keeps paying for a loser that long. Those are the messages to study first.

2. The landing pages

Group ads by landing page URL. You will usually find two or three pages that get most of the ads. That tells you which offer converts for them: a free trial, a demo, a template gallery, a comparison page against you.

3. The angle, not the wording

Do not copy the headline. Write down the angle behind it: speed ("set up in 5 minutes"), price ("free for teams under 10"), pain ("stop chasing invoices"), social proof ("used by 50,000 teams"). Then test the same angle in your own words.

4. Where they spend

The country list shows where they are pushing. If a competitor suddenly starts running ads in Germany, they are probably launching there. If they stopped in a market, it probably did not pay off.

5. Video hooks

For YouTube ads, watch only the first five seconds of each. That is the hook they paid to test. Collect the ones that keep running and you have a swipe file of hooks that work in your niche.

A simple weekly routine

Run the same input once a week with "only running ads" turned on and save the results. Compare with last week:

• new ads mean they are testing something
• ads that disappeared were probably losing
• a new landing page means a new offer

Twenty minutes a week and you always know what your competitors are betting on, without paying for their mistakes.

Good to know

• Search ads are published as an image of the ad, so for those you get a screenshot rather than separate text fields.
• Impression numbers are only published for ads shown in the EU.
• This is public data Google shows on purpose, so anyone can check who advertises what. Use it to learn, not to clone someone's brand.