How to see your competitors' Google ads, and get only the new ones every morning

Google publishes a public library of ads: the Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com). Search an advertiser or a website and you can see their search, display and YouTube ads, when each was first and last shown, and in which regions.

Step 1: The free, manual way

1. Open adstransparency.google.com.
2. Search a competitor's name or domain. Domain search also catches resellers and affiliates pointing ads at that site.
3. Filter by region, format and date.

This is great for a one-off look. It falls short when you want to track 20 competitors, export the creatives, or know what's new since last week without scrolling past the same long-running ads again.

What the library will not tell you: spend, bids or the keywords a competitor targets. Google doesn't publish those for commercial ads. Treat any tool that promises them from this source with suspicion.

Step 2: Export it

The Google Ads Transparency Library Actor on Apify searches by domain, advertiser name or ID, or keyword (which finds advertisers), and exports each ad with:

• format (text, image or video),
• firstShown, lastShown and daysShown (long-running ads are usually the ones that work),
• the rendered ad image, or the YouTube URL, video ID and thumbnail for video ads,
• target domain and the Transparency Center link.

{
  "domains": ["competitor-one.com", "competitor-two.com"],
  "region": "US",
  "adFormat": "ALL",
  "dateFrom": "2026-09-01",
  "maxAdsPerQuery": 200,
  "onlyNewAds": true,
  "monitorName": "crm-competitors"
}

No Google account, API key or cookies needed.

Step 3: Turn it into a monitor and only pay for new ads

The first run pulls the competitors' current ads, up to your limit. With onlyNewAds on and a daily Schedule, every later run delivers only ads this monitor hasn't seen.

• Money: $0.012 per ad delivered ($12 per 1,000). Ads you already have aren't re-sent and aren't charged. maxAdsTotal caps any run.
• Time: no hand-filtering of the long-running ads that show up every run.
• Mental effort: the morning Slack message is "Competitor X launched 3 new video ads", not their whole back catalog.

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("SureSignal/google-ads-transparency-library").call(run_input={
    "domains": ["competitor-one.com"],
    "region": "US",
    "onlyNewAds": True,
    "monitorName": "competitor-one-us",
})
for ad in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(ad["format"], ad.get("firstShown"), ad.get("videoUrl") or ad.get("imageUrl"), ad["adUrl"])

Optional add-on: regions shown and variation count per ad, at $3 per 1,000 ads.

What to do with it

• Review new creatives weekly and tag the offer, hook and landing page.
• Sort by daysShown. Ads that have run for months are worth studying.
• Brand protection: search your own domain to spot resellers or affiliates bidding on it.

Honest limits

• No spend, keywords or bids (Google doesn't publish them).
• Google searches advertisers and domains, not ad copy text.
• Zero results usually means that format or region didn't run. Try region anywhere and format ALL.

A decision is only as good as the information behind it. Seeing a competitor's new offer the week it launches beats discovering it in a quarterly review.

SureSignal: only pay for new data.

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Try it: google-ads-transparency-library on the Apify Store. You only pay for new data: runs on a schedule skip what you've already received.