Warby Parker's typical Google ad in the US has been running for about 594 days. Gymshark's has been running for 49. Of the last 60 US ads each brand showed, 28 of Gymshark's went live in the past month, against 6 of Warby Parker's.
All of that comes from a free Google page, the Ads Transparency Center. Below: how to read it for any competitor, two mistakes that make it misleading, and the numbers behind the chart.
The free way
- Go to adstransparency.google.com. No login.
- Type the competitor's website domain (
warbyparker.com), not their brand name. More on why in a minute. - Check the country next to the search box. It defaults to wherever you are, so switch it to the market you compete in.
- Filter by format if you only care about video or image ads.
- Click into an ad to see its preview, its variations and when it was last shown.
That's it. You'll see Search, YouTube, Display and Shopping ads in one grid.
What you won't see: spend, impressions, clicks or targeting. Google doesn't publish those for commercial ads, so spend figures can't come from this page.
Mistake 1: searching the brand name
I searched "HelloFresh" with the US selected. Every advertiser Google suggested was called HelloFresh SE and registered in Germany. The top three had 17 US ads between them, and only 8 of those had run in the past week.
Then I searched hellofresh.com. 57 of the first 60 ads came from an advertiser called Grocery Delivery E-Services USA Inc., all shown in the past 7 days. That's HelloFresh's US company, and the name search never surfaced it.
Samsung is worse. The top three suggestions for "Samsung" are accounts registered in Malaysia, Italy and Saudi Arabia: 13 US ads, none shown in the past week. samsung.com returns Google's estimate of about 10,000 US ads, and 35 of the first 40 came from "Samsung Electronics America". Most of the rest were agencies (Cheil Colombia, Channel Factory).
Big companies advertise under legal entity names and per-country accounts. A domain search finds the advertisers promoting the website, whatever their accounts are called.
Mistake 2: treating every ad as current
The grid mixes ads that ran for one day with ads that have run for years. Google records two dates for every ad (depending on your region, the ad page shows one or both; the export further down always has both):
- First shown tells you when they launched it.
- Last shown tells you if it's still live.
- The gap between them tells you how long they've kept paying for it.
An ad that's still running after a year is one nobody has bothered to switch off. That doesn't prove it converts, but it's a much better shortlist than "the ads that showed up first in the grid".
What the 5 brands are doing
I pulled the first 60 US ads Google lists for each domain on 2026-10-24. All 300 had been shown in the past 7 days, so this is what's live, not their history.
| Brand | Google's estimate of US ads | Median days live | Live 1 year+ | New in last 30 days | Formats (text / image / video) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warby Parker | ~4,000 | 594 | 36 | 6 | 55 / 3 / 2 |
| Allbirds | ~900 | 226 | 15 | 5 | 25 / 30 / 5 |
| HelloFresh | ~800 | 177 | 12 | 6 | 52 / 8 / 0 |
| Glossier | ~700 | 142 | 26 | 17 | 36 / 5 / 19 |
| Gymshark | ~2,000 | 49 | 15 | 28 | 27 / 10 / 23 |
Out of 60 ads each. What I'd take from it:
- Warby Parker is running a search machine. 55 of 60 are text ads, and over half have run for more than a year. 6 of them have a first-shown date of 2021-10-25, the same date as Gymshark's oldest ad. That looks like the earliest date the Transparency Center reports, so some of these ads are probably older.
- Gymshark tests constantly. Almost half of its live ads launched in the past month, 6 of them in the past week, and video is 23 of 60. If you sell into the same audience, this is the account to check weekly.
- Glossier sits in between: a core of long-running ads (26 over a year old) plus a steady flow of new video.
- Allbirds leans on image ads (30 of 60), the only brand of the five where images outnumber text.
- HelloFresh ran no video in this sample.
One more thing showed up in the Gymshark results: 2 of the 60 ads came from advertisers that aren't Gymshark's own accounts. A domain search includes every advertiser promoting the site, resellers and agencies too. If it's your own brand, that's a quick way to see who else is advertising it.
Getting it into a spreadsheet
The Transparency Center has no export. For one competitor and a quick look, scrolling is fine. For a weekly check on five competitors, or a pitch deck for a client, copying dates off ad pages gets old fast.
Disclosure: I built a tool for this. Google Ads Transparency Scraper on Apify takes a list of domains, advertiser names or advertiser IDs and exports every ad with its format, first and last shown dates, preview image and a link back to Google's page, as CSV, Excel or JSON. It costs $0.002 per ad, so the latest 100 ads of one competitor are $0.20, and searches that find nothing aren't charged. In my test run it pulled 312 ads from 4 searches in about 30 seconds.
The table above took one run with five domains, country set to US and 60 ads per domain.
I'll re-run the same five brands in December to see how many of Gymshark's 28 new ads are still alive.
An AI assistant helped me draft this article. I checked every number against the raw data myself; it was fetched from Google's Ads Transparency Center on 2026-10-24.
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