How I see every ad my competitor is running, without any inside access

For a long time I assumed knowing what a competitor was advertising required
some tool I could not afford, or a friend on the inside. It turns out the whole
thing is public, and most people never look because they do not know where.

Meta runs an Ad Library. By law, every ad running on Facebook and Instagram is
listed there, searchable by brand, with the creative, the format, and the dates
it has been live. It is open to anyone. The catch is the interface is slow and
built for one-ad-at-a-time browsing, so nobody uses it for real analysis. I wired
it to pull the whole picture in one call.

What I actually did

Here is the call I run against a competitor's name:

// tools/call → competitor_ads
{ "search_terms": ["Nike"], "country": "US", "status": "all" }

For Nike that came back in about ten seconds with live ads, including a
Spanish-language birthday promotion running across Facebook, Instagram, Audience
Network and Messenger. Each ad comes back with its creative text, its media type,
the advertiser page, and the dates it has been running.

That last field is the one that matters, and I will explain why.

The step that turns ads into intelligence

1. Pull all active ads for the competitor. You now have their entire live
   creative in front of you, not a guess.

2. Sort by how long each ad has been running. This is the tell. A brand
   kills ads that do not perform, fast, because they cost money every day. So an
   ad that has been live for four months is not luck. It is their best
   performer, the one they have tested against everything else and kept.

3. Read the long-runners, ignore the rest. The ad that has survived since
   March is telling you which message, which offer, and which audience is
   working for them right now. You just got their best-tested marketing angle
   for free.

4. Watch for new entrants. Run it weekly. A brand-new ad that suddenly gets
   heavy placement is a launch or a new campaign. You are seeing it on day one.

Why this works

Advertisers pay by the day. That single fact makes their spending honest in a
way their marketing never is. They will tell you anything in a press release,
but they will not pay to keep running an ad that does not sell. Duration is a
vote they place with real money, every day, and it is all public record.

You are not spying. You are reading a disclosure they are legally required to
make, in a format they hoped was too tedious to use.

Honest limits

This is Meta only, so Facebook, Instagram and their network. It does not cover
Google, TikTok or other channels. And you see the creative and the run dates,
not the spend amount or the exact audience, unless the ad is political. But for
figuring out what message a competitor believes in enough to keep paying for,
duration is most of the answer.

The tool is the E-commerce Intelligence MCP
from The Mine Works, running on Apify with your own account. It bills per ad
returned, so a competitor sweep costs a few cents and a name with no ads costs
nothing.