Most people know Duolingo as the green owl that guilts you into a daily Spanish lesson. If you look only at its ads in the Google Ads Transparency Center, you'd meet a different product: an English proficiency exam for people applying to universities.
I pulled 150 Google ads for duolingo.com on October 26, 2026. The library decoded a headline for 28 of them. 27 of those 28 headlines are about the Duolingo English Test (DET), the online exam that students send to schools. The one exception is "Try 1 Month For $0", which doesn't name a product at all. None of the 28 mentions learning a language in the app.
The headlines, counted
I grouped the 28 decoded headlines by exact text:
| Headline | Ads | Language |
|---|---|---|
| Send to Every School for $0 | 11 | English |
| Sin centros de examinación | 9 | Spanish |
| Simulados grátis e ilimitados | 3 | Portuguese |
| Examen 70 % más económico | 2 | Spanish |
| English Test for Modern Times: Fast, Efficient, Affordable | 1 | English |
| Fast & Flexible English Test | 1 | English |
| Try 1 Month For $0 | 1 | English |
The Spanish lines translate as "No test centers" and "An exam 70% cheaper". The Portuguese one means "Free, unlimited practice tests". The count used a plain keyword rule (test, school, examen, examinación, simulados), and "Try 1 Month For $0" was the only headline it didn't match.
Read together, the headlines work as a list of test-taker objections: the cost of sending scores, the trip to a test center, the price, and preparation. Each headline answers one, and the most common (11 ads) is about score reports.
The longer copy says the same thing
The library also returned description text for two of the eight longest-shown Google ads, both videos:
"Trusted by 475+ programs in Canada."
"Study and work in Canada with DET – the smart, flexible & trusted English test."
So the two longer texts I can read are aimed at people heading to Canada for study or work, and they lead with institutional acceptance rather than price.
The format mix on Google is 72 text ads, 43 video and 35 image. 42 ads link to a YouTube video. Of the 150 ads, 149 come from Duolingo Inc and 1 from Logicserve Digital Consultancy Services Pvt Ltd.
Search demand points the same way
Google Trends for "Duolingo" over the past 12 months: average interest 71.1, a peak of 100 on February 22, 2026, and 72 now (-7.1% over the period). The interesting part is the top related queries:
- duolingo english
- duolingo test
- duolingo english test
- duolingo app
- duolingo price
Two of the top three name the test outright, the first one could mean either, and "duolingo app" comes fourth. Trends ranks queries without giving volumes, so this shows what people type next to "Duolingo", not how many of them.
Among rising queries, "taco bell duolingo hot sauce" is up +2,550%. It matches a one-day LinkedIn ad from October 2, 2026 about a Taco Bell partnership, 5k–10k impressions.
LinkedIn: hiring, partners, and educators
LinkedIn returned 31 ads, 28 from the Duolingo page and 3 from Duolingo Licensing. The most common format is Single Image Ad (13), followed by Document Ad (6) and Video Ad (4). A large part of the copy is employer branding: engineering puzzles, product roles, a relocation offer to Pittsburgh. The test shows up again, aimed at teachers this time, in an ad that greets educators by first name:
"With demand for the Duolingo English Test (DET) surging, students need support more than ever. Are you ready to guide them?"
Three German-language video ads are posts by individual creators tagged #LinkedInPartner and #DuolingoPartner. They promote adding a Duolingo Score to your LinkedIn profile as proof of language skills. Like the Google ads, they put the credential side of Duolingo up front.
What this data can't tell you
- 28 headlines out of 150 ads. The library left the headline empty for most ads, including all eight longest-shown ones. The other 122 ads could be about anything, including the app. The 27-of-28 figure describes the decoded slice, and I'm not drawing conclusions about Google copywriting beyond which product each headline names.
- No dates worth reading into. The eight longest-shown Google ads ran 169–182 days, and four of them were first shown on April 27, 2026. That looks like the edge of the library's window, so I'm not calling anything "long-running".
- No spend, no results, EU-only LinkedIn details. Nothing here tells you how Duolingo splits its budget or whether the DET ads work. App-install campaigns may run on channels I didn't pull. LinkedIn published dates and impressions for only 5 of the 31 ads (those shown in the EU).
3 things to test this week
- Write one headline per objection. List the reasons people pick a competitor (price, travel, prep, sending results) and give each its own headline, the way the DET ads do, instead of one headline that tries to cover all of them.
- Check what your brand's related queries are really about. Pull Trends for your brand name and see whether one product line dominates the top queries. If it does, check whether your search ads say so.
- Translate the objection, not the slogan. "Sin centros de examinación" isn't a translation of any English headline in the sample. Test local headlines built on the objection that matters most in that market.
How to repeat this for another brand
I built these scrapers. The Google Ads Transparency Scraper takes a domain and returns every ad's format, dates, advertiser entity and any decoded text, and the Google Trends Scraper returns interest over time plus top and rising queries. Both are no-code forms with CSV or Excel export, free to try on the Apify free plan, and a run of a few hundred ads costs well under a dollar.
Not affiliated with Duolingo; all data is from public ad libraries.
If your brand has a famous free product and a less-known paid one, which would you put in your search ad headlines: the one people already know, or the one they pay for?
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