Guide
How to find competitor ads on Facebook, Google, and YouTube — free
Every major platform now publishes some version of a free ad transparency tool, mostly because regulators made them. Here's where to actually look on each one, and where they stop being useful once your research goes past "look up one company I already know."
Facebook & Instagram
Meta Ad Library (facebook.com/ads/library) is still the fastest route. Search the Page's exact name — not their Instagram handle, that trips people up constantly — filter to "All ads" and "Active," and you'll see every creative they're currently running. If it comes back empty, it's usually not you: an ad blocker choking on the word "ads" in the URL, or a rate limit if you've been logged out and searching a lot in a row.
Google Search, Display & YouTube
Google's Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com) covers Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail. You need the advertiser's name or domain going in — it won't let you search by what the ad actually says.
TikTok and LinkedIn
Both technically have ad libraries now, but neither is much use outside specific cases. TikTok's Commercial Content Library only shows EEA/UK/Switzerland data — nothing for the US. LinkedIn's is a manual company-lookup with no export and no date filtering. Treat both as a last resort, not a starting point.
X (Twitter)
No public ad library at all. Your best bet is searching the advertiser's handle directly on X, or checking whether their ads have already been picked up by a cross-platform archive.
Search all six platforms in one place
Ad Repository is a free, public archive of ads collected from Facebook, X, Google Search, Google Display, Google Shopping, and YouTube — full-text searchable, with no login and an engagement history most official ad libraries don't show.
Frequently asked questions
Are the official tools actually free?+
Yes, Meta Ad Library and Google's Ads Transparency Center both are, and neither needs an account.
So what's missing from them?+
Mainly two things: you have to already know who you're looking for, and neither tracks how an ad's performance has changed since it launched. Every ad just looks like it went live yesterday.
Do I need to pay for a tool like BigSpy or AdSpy?+
Only if you specifically need spend estimates or targeting inference on top of the search. The core searching-ad-creative part is covered free by the official libraries and by Ad Repository.
Can I search by what the ad actually says, not just who made it?+
That's the one thing the official libraries won't do. Ad Repository indexes the ad copy itself, so a keyword or phrase search works even if you have no idea who's behind it.