Google Ads Transparency Scraper — Competitor Ad Library

See every ad a competitor runs on Google for $1.50 per 1,000 ads (from $1.20 on higher Apify plans), plus a $0.005 start fee per run and no platform fees. Search the public Google Ads Transparency Center by brand name, website domain, advertiser ID or a pasted Transparency Center link, and get each ad's format, first and last shown dates, how long it has run, Google's screenshot or preview, and optionally its ad text and countries. No login, no cookies, no Google account.

What Google Ads Transparency data can you scrape?

• Competitor ad research: every creative a competitor runs, by country, with the date each one started. Ads that have run for months (shownForDays) are usually the ones that work.
• Ad copy and products: with Ad details on, each ad's headline, description and display URL, the product title and image of Shopping ads, the countries it ran in, and the YouTube video of video ads where Google shows it.
• New-ad alerts: turn on Only new ads and schedule a daily run. You get, and pay for, only ads you haven't received before.
• Who advertises for a website: search a domain like nike.com to see every advertiser account whose ads point there, including resellers and agencies.
• Market research on companies: run Advertisers mode on a list of companies to see which ones advertise on Google, how much (Google's approximate ad count), and from which country.
• Google Ads IDs: ads with a Google preview carry Google Ads' own customer, ad group and creative IDs, the same ones an agency sees in the advertiser's Google Ads account.

What this tool doesn't do
No platform filter yet (Search / YouTube / Shopping / Maps / Play). No political-ads spend data. No landing-page crawling: Google rarely includes landing pages. Ad text comes from Google's preview, so purely visual ads have none.

How much does it cost to scrape Google Ads Transparency?

Pay per result plus a small start fee, no platform fees. Your Apify plan sets your price tier:

Event	Free plan	Starter	Scale	Business
Ad (per 1,000)	$1.80	$1.50	$1.30	$1.20
Ad details found (per 1,000, only with Ad details on, only where found)	$3.60	$3.00	$2.70	$2.40
Advertiser (per 1,000, Advertisers mode)	$2.00	$2.00	$2.00	$2.00
Run start (per run)	$0.005	$0.005	$0.005	$0.005

Apify's $5 free plan ≈ 2,700 ads.

Examples on Starter: 100 ads cost $0.155. 1,000 ads cost $1.505. 1,000 ads with details cost about $4.51. A daily monitoring run that finds 15 new ads costs $0.0275.

Ads your filters skip, ads Google doesn't have, ads already delivered by another of your searches and searches that fail are free. Set Maximum cost per run in the run options and the scraper stops exactly there.

How to scrape Google Ads Transparency

1. Put your search terms in Search terms, one per line: Nike (advertiser name), nike.com or https://www.nike.com/running (domain), AR16735076323512287233 (advertiser ID), or any adstransparency.google.com advertiser, ad or domain link.
2. Pick a Region (or Anywhere) and how many ads you want per search.
3. Click Start. In our own test, three Nike searches (name, domain and advertiser ID) returned 450 ads from 14 requests.

Field	What it does
Search terms	Names, domains, advertiser IDs or Transparency Center links, mixed in one run.
What to get	Ads (default): one row per ad. Advertisers: one row per advertiser account.
Region	A country (e.g. United States) or Anywhere. Only ads shown in that country.
Max ads per search	Default 100, up to 10,000 per search term. With a format, date or Only new ads filter, a search looks through at most 10× this number (at least 1,000) to find matching ads.
Ad format	All, Text, Image or Video.
Shown in the last N days	e.g. 7 for ads shown in the past week. Best for scheduled runs; replaces Shown on or after when set.
Shown on or after / on or before	Date window (YYYY-MM-DD). An ad counts if it was shown at any time inside the window.
Advertiser accounts per name	Default 3, up to 10. How many matching accounts a name search uses. Exact matches come first; look-alike names (say "Nikes Tavern" for "Nike") are never used.
Ad details	Ad text (headline, description, display URL, business name), Shopping product title and image, countries shown, variations, YouTube video where shown (extra event, see the cost table).
Only new ads	Monitoring mode; see below.
Proxy	Apify Proxy by default; switches to residential IPs automatically if Google keeps refusing (no extra cost to you).

Output

One row per ad. This one is from a real run in October 2026, with times rounded to the day:

{
    "type": "ad",
    "searchTerm": "AR16735076323512287233",
    "searchType": "advertiser-id",
    "region": "US",
    "position": 2,
    "advertiserId": "AR16735076323512287233",
    "advertiserName": "Nike, Inc.",
    "creativeId": "CR06550380396951896065",
    "format": "TEXT",
    "formatCode": 1,
    "firstShown": "2024-10-21T00:00:00.000Z",
    "lastShown": "2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z",
    "shownForDays": 716,
    "daysSinceLastShown": 0,
    "landingDomain": "nike.com",
    "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/17075086515930010296",
    "previewUrl": null,
    "width": 348,
    "height": 160,
    "googleCustomerId": null,
    "googleAdGroupId": null,
    "googleCreativeId": null,
    "adUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233/creative/CR06550380396951896065?region=US",
    "advertiserUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233?region=US"
}

With Ad details on, the same ad also had:

{
    "regionsShown": ["US"],
    "adHeadline": "Nike® Official Site",
    "adDescription": "The classic Nike Shox are back with fresh and vibrant colors. Shop now at Nike®.",
    "adDisplayUrl": "nike.com",
    "productTitle": null,
    "detailsFound": true
}

• imageUrl is Google's own picture of the ad: for text ads Google stores a screenshot. Image, Shopping and video ads come with a previewUrl (Google's preview script) instead; Ad details reads the ad text, product and image out of it.
• shownForDays counts calendar days from first to last shown. daysSinceLastShown is 0–1 for ads running today.
• Detail fields: regionsShown (country codes), variations, adHeadline, adDescription, adDisplayUrl, adBusinessName, productTitle, productImageUrl, adTextParts (every text snippet found), youtubeVideoId, youtubeUrl, landingUrl (rarely available) and detailsFound. Fields Google doesn't show for an ad are null. Dynamic search ads have no fixed headline (Google writes it from the landing page), so adHeadline is null there.

In Advertisers mode, one row per advertiser account:

{
    "type": "advertiser",
    "searchTerm": "Nike",
    "searchType": "name",
    "region": "anywhere",
    "advertiserId": "AR16735076323512287233",
    "advertiserName": "Nike, Inc.",
    "country": "US",
    "approxAdCountMin": 9000,
    "approxAdCountMax": 10000,
    "adsFound": null,
    "formats": null,
    "firstShown": null,
    "lastShown": null,
    "advertiserUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233?region=anywhere"
}

With a Region, name searches keep only the accounts that have ads in that country (Google's ad counts are still worldwide). For a domain or advertiser ID, Advertisers mode looks through up to Max ads per search of its ads and returns each advertiser account found, with adsFound, formats (ads per format) and the first/last shown dates of those ads.

The run's key-value store has an OUTPUT summary: per search term the advertiser accounts used, results delivered, ads looked at, whether the look-through limit was reached, and any error.

Monitoring competitors' new ads

1. Put your competitors in Search terms, turn on Only new ads, and give the job a Monitoring memory name (e.g. competitors-us).
2. Run it once: you get the competitors' ads (up to Max ads per search each), and the tool remembers them in a key-value store of that name in your Apify account.
3. Schedule it (Apify → Schedules), daily or weekly. Add Shown in the last N days (e.g. 7) to skip long-retired ads on the first run. Each run returns only ads it hasn't delivered before, and you pay only for those. Connect Slack, email or Zapier to the run to get alerts.

Set Max ads per search high enough to cover a competitor's current ads on the first run. If it is lower, the next runs also return older ads that didn't fit before; check firstShown to tell freshly launched ads apart. Delete or rename the memory store to start over.

Google Ads Transparency API: Python, JavaScript, Zapier, Make and AI agents (MCP)

Run it from your own code with the Apify API or client libraries (the API tab shows ready-made Python, JavaScript and cURL snippets), from Zapier or Make with the Apify app, or from an AI agent through Apify's MCP server: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=aaronoptimus/google-ads-transparency-scraper.

Example input:

{
    "searchTerms": ["nike.com", "Adidas", "AR16735076323512287233"],
    "region": "US",
    "maxAdsPerSearch": 200,
    "adFormat": "video",
    "shownInLastDays": 30
}

Good to know

• The data is what Google publishes in its Ads Transparency Center. Google shows ads it served since 2018-05-31 (political ads in some regions earlier); ad counts in Advertisers mode are Google's own approximate ranges.
• A domain search returns every advertiser Google links to that domain, which can include resellers and unrelated accounts.
• Each ad is delivered once per run. If two of your search terms find the same ad, the second one skips it, and you aren't charged twice.
• Google limits requests per IP. The scraper rotates Apify proxy sessions, retries refused requests with growing pauses, and moves to residential IPs if needed. It never solves CAPTCHAs or logs in.
• A search that still fails is listed in the run log and the OUTPUT summary and is not charged. If Google ever changes its answer format, searches fail with a clear message instead of returning an empty "success".
• Runs time out after 1 hour by default. Plain ad searches take about a second per page of 100 ads; Ad details add a few requests per ad. For thousands of ads with details, raise the timeout in Run options. A run that nears its timeout stops cleanly and keeps everything delivered.
• If Google refuses the detail lookups for 3 ads in a row, the run delivers the rest of the ads without details (not charged for details).

FAQ

Do I need a Google account or API key? No. The scraper reads the public Transparency Center, logged out.

Why did a search return fewer ads than I asked for? The advertiser has fewer ads (in that region), or your filters matched fewer within the look-through limit. The OUTPUT summary shows how many ads each search looked at.

Is ad text included? Yes, with Ad details on: headline, description, display URL and business name, or product title for Shopping ads, wherever Google's preview carries them. Without details you get Google's screenshot of text ads (imageUrl).

What does a failed search cost? Nothing. Only delivered ads, details and advertisers are charged, plus the run start fee.

Is this legal? The tool reads only the public, logged-out Google Ads Transparency Center, the same pages anyone can open in a browser. It collects advertiser information Google publishes for transparency and nothing about people who saw the ads. Most advertisers are companies, but some are individuals (sole traders, freelancers, political candidates) whose names Google publishes after verifying them. Don't use the data to profile or contact private persons; you are responsible for using it lawfully (including GDPR where it applies) and in line with Google's terms.

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This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google.