Seeing what a competitor advertises on Google used to mean either running searches and looking at the results or paying for a tool. In March 2023 Google opened the Ads Transparency Center. At adstransparency.google.com you type an advertiser's name or a website and that advertiser's ads are listed.
It resembles Meta's Ad Library but it is not the same thing. The way you search, the fields it shows and the gaps it leaves are different. This post covers how to use it for competitor tracking.
What the center shows
According to Google's launch announcement, the center shows the ads an advertiser has run, which ads were shown in a given region, the last date an ad ran and the ad's format. Google's Ads policy help page lists the coverage as Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube. You can filter results by date and targeted location.
On the advertiser side there are two cases. A verified advertiser shows its legal or trademark name and location. An unverified advertiser shows the name and location on its payment profile. If the payer differs from the advertiser, the payer's name is shown too. That detail helps when you are looking for a competitor that advertises through an agency.
The same help page says that for some countries and regions additional information is available: targeting information, the total number of recipients per ad and a subject matter label. It also states that Google provides API access to data about ads served in Türkiye.
Finding the right advertiser
The first job is working out which advertiser accounts your competitor appears under. A search by brand name can return companies with the same name in other countries, resellers, or others using the brand name in their own ads. Searching by website usually gives cleaner results.
Verify every advertiser you find once. Is the location right? Do the ads lead to the competitor's site? Large brands may advertise from more than one account. Write them all on one list and use the same list on every check, or the difference between two weeks comes from your search, not from the competitor.
What to read
Each time you look at a competitor's list, look for answers to these questions:
- Which new ads appeared and in which format: text, image or video.
- Which ads have a last-shown date that is falling behind, meaning they are no longer running.
- What offer or promise the search ad headlines carry.
- Whether the share of video ads went up.
Search ad copy teaches a lot. What does the competitor lead with: price, speed or trust? If headlines change from week to week, the competitor is testing. If the same headline has stayed for months, it looks settled on that message. The two call for different responses. You keep watching a competitor that is testing, and you write your own answer to the message of one that has settled.
In image and video ads the offer is often written on the creative. The center shows you the image, and reading the text inside it is a separate step.
How often to check
For most competitors a weekly check is enough. Because the center keeps past ads with their last-shown date, you can still find an ad you missed on your next check. In Meta's library, a commercial ad that stopped can no longer be searched. That difference makes tracking on the Google side more forgiving.
Check more often in busy periods. At the start of a season or during a big discount week, a competitor's copy can change within days. On every check, write new ads, stopped ads and headline changes on separate lines. A single note that says changed means nothing a month later.
Limits
The center does not show spend, clicks or the keywords that were bid on. You see a search ad but not which search it appeared for. To understand which keywords a competitor advertises on, you have to track search results separately.
Read the date fields carefully too. The last-shown date tells you when the ad last ran, not that it ran continuously until then. An ad with months between its first and last shown dates may have appeared on only a few days of that period. Reading run time as spend misleads here as well.
Reading it alongside Meta's library
Competitors often launch big campaigns on both sides at once. If a discount ad starts on Meta in the same week a search ad with the same offer appears on Google, the campaign has budget and a plan behind it, and there is most likely a landing page on the site too. An offer seen on only one side looks more like a trial. Putting both sources on one calendar makes that difference visible. For the Meta side: Tracking competitor Meta ads in the Ad Library.
With Adversee
Adversee maps the Google advertisers of the brands you track and lists their ads with format, country and first and last shown dates. When Google provides an impression range it is shown; when it does not, the field stays empty. Data for Türkiye and Europe comes from Google's public dataset with a delay of a few days, so ads that started in the last few days may be missing from the list.
Start tracking competitor moves automatically.