Competitor ads: how to see every ad a competitor runs
Meta, Google and LinkedIn publish searchable libraries of the ads running on them worldwide. TikTok and X only cover ads shown in Europe. Below is where each one is, what you can search by, and what it leaves out.
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
facebook.com/ads/library. Choose "All ads", pick a country, and search the company's Facebook page name. You see every ad that is active now, with the image or video, the text, the start date and the platforms it runs on. Ads that have stopped stay visible only if they ran in the EU or were about politics or social issues.
Google (Search, YouTube, Display)
adstransparency.google.com. Search by advertiser name or by website domain; the domain search is the faster route when you don't know the legal entity behind the ads. Filter by country, date range and format. Search ads show the headline and text, YouTube ads the video. Keywords, budgets and landing-page variants are not shown.
linkedin.com/ad-library. Search by company name and, optionally, by country and date. It lists ads from the last 12 months with the creative and the copy. Targeting and spend are shown only for ads served in the EU.
TikTok
library.tiktok.com. It covers ads shown in the EU, the UK and Switzerland. An advertiser that only buys TikTok in the US will not appear.
X (Twitter)
X's Ads Repository also covers only ads shown in the EU. In the US, an ad that was written only as an ad never appears on the company's profile or in search, so you can't scroll to it.
People do reply to those ads, though, and replies are searchable. Search to:companyhandle on X, open the replies, and look at the post each one answers. A post written by the company that is not on its public profile is almost always an ad. We tested this on our own accounts against the X Ads API: on one account all 16 posts it found were real ads; on a busier one it found 11 of 46 ads, the ones that got replies, which carried 43% of the impressions. So it finds the big ads and misses the quiet ones. Check the founders' handles too; small companies often run ads from the founder's account.
Doing it for many competitors
Checking five libraries for ten competitors every week is 50 searches. CompetitorBase runs all five, including the X reply search, when you enter a competitor's domain, and re-checks them: the libraries daily, X once a week. You get an email when a competitor starts or stops advertising on a network or launches a new ad.