Google Ads Transparency Scraper & Competitor Ad Monitor

Scrape the Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com) for any advertiser, AR advertiser ID, website domain or Transparency Center URL. For each ad creative you get the ad text (headline, description, display URL, call to action, sitelinks), image and YouTube video URLs, first and last shown dates, regions, platforms (Google Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play), impression ranges and targeting (EU/EEA disclosures), the advertiser's verification status and a link back to the ad in the Transparency Center.

Turn on monitoring mode to see which ads your competitors launched or stopped since the last run. Every run also adds a free summary row per advertiser with active ads, new ads, and the mix of formats, platforms and regions.

• ✅ Real ad text, not only screenshots: Google archives most Search text ads only as images. This Actor reads the text from them (OCR) and from the ad preview data, so you get headline, description and displayUrl as text you can search and analyze.
• ✅ Competitor ad monitoring: schedule the Actor daily or weekly and get only the NEW and STOPPED ads, plus per-advertiser change counts.
• ✅ Flexible input: advertiser names (e.g. Nike), IDs (AR...), domains (booking.com) or any Transparency Center URL (advertiser, creative or domain search, with its region/format/platform/date filters).
• ✅ Filters: region (any country), date range or "last N days", format (text, image, video) and platform (Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play).
• ✅ Fast and cheap: plain HTTP requests to the Transparency Center's own data endpoints, no browser. Hundreds of ads per minute.
• ✅ Pay only for ads: summary rows, error rows, retries and failed requests are free.

What data can you get?

Group	Fields
Advertiser	advertiserName, advertiserId (AR...), advertiserVerified, advertiserCountry, advertiserLegalName
Creative	creativeId (CR...), format (TEXT / IMAGE / VIDEO), adUrl (Transparency Center link), previewImageUrl, variationsCount
Ad text	headline, description, longHeadline, callToAction, displayUrl, businessName, sitelinks, productTitle, merchant, textSource (preview or ocr), ocrConfidence
Media & landing page	imageUrls, videoId, videoUrl, videoThumbnailUrl, youtubeChannel, landingUrl, landingDomain
Dates	firstShown, lastShown, daysShown, isActive
Reach	regionCodes, regions (per country: first/last shown, impression range, platforms), impressionsMin, impressionsMax, platforms, topic, targeting
Monitoring	changeType (NEW / STOPPED)
Summary rows (type: summary)	adsInThisRun, activeAdCount, newThisRun, stoppedThisRun, totalAdsMin / totalAdsMax, formatsMix, platformsMix, topRegions, newestAdFirstShown, latestShown, adsWithText

Google only publishes impressions, per-platform data and targeting for ads shown in the EU/EEA (Digital Services Act). For other regions, these fields are empty.

How to use

1. Add targets: advertiser names, AR... advertiser IDs, website domains or Transparency Center URLs. You can mix them.
2. Optionally pick a region, a date range (or last N days), formats and platforms.
3. Set max ads per target (default 50). Ads are returned newest first (by last shown date).
4. For competitor monitoring, turn on Monitoring mode and schedule the Actor. The first run saves a baseline. Later runs return only new and stopped ads.
5. Click Start and download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or use the API.

Input example

{
    "targets": ["Nike", "booking.com", "AR09597646619583447041",
                "https://adstransparency.google.com/?region=DE&domain=zalando.de&format=IMAGE"],
    "maxAdsPerTarget": 100,
    "region": "US",
    "lastDays": 30,
    "formats": ["TEXT", "VIDEO"],
    "platforms": ["SEARCH", "YOUTUBE"],
    "monitorMode": false
}

Output example

{
    "type": "ad",
    "advertiserName": "The Coca-Cola Company",
    "advertiserId": "AR09597646619583447041",
    "advertiserVerified": true,
    "advertiserCountry": "US",
    "creativeId": "CR15474841625041043457",
    "format": "TEXT",
    "headline": "Single-Serve 14oz Bottle - fairlife 14oz - fairlife® 14oz On The Go",
    "description": "fairlife® Ultra-Filtered Milk 14oz Has 50% More Protein Than Regular Milk. Delicious Flavors Of fairlife® Ultra-Filtered...",
    "displayUrl": "www.fairlife.com/",
    "businessName": "Fairlife",
    "sitelinks": ["14oz Bottles To Take On The Go", "Where To Buy", "Find The Nearest Store Now"],
    "textSource": "ocr",
    "landingDomain": "fairlife.com",
    "previewImageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/13015767299354987170",
    "firstShown": "2024-06-28T22:31:59Z",
    "lastShown": "2026-10-08T14:44:32Z",
    "daysShown": 787,
    "isActive": true,
    "regionCodes": ["US"],
    "platforms": ["GOOGLE_SEARCH"],
    "adUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR09597646619583447041/creative/CR15474841625041043457?region=anywhere"
}

A summary row:

{
    "type": "summary",
    "advertiserName": "The Coca-Cola Company",
    "advertiserId": "AR09597646619583447041",
    "adsInThisRun": 25, "activeAdCount": 25, "newThisRun": 3, "stoppedThisRun": 1,
    "formatsMix": {"TEXT": 25}, "platformsMix": {"GOOGLE_SEARCH": 25}, "topRegions": {"US": 25}
}

Competitor ad monitoring

With Monitoring mode on, the Actor stores the ads it saw for each target (and filter set) in a named key-value store (monitorStoreName, default google-ads-transparency-monitor). On the next run it compares the current ads with that state:

• changeType: "NEW": an ad that wasn't there in the previous run.
• changeType: "STOPPED": an ad that was active before but hasn't been shown in the last activeWithinDays days (default 7), or was removed from the Transparency Center.
• changeType: "RESUMED": an ad that had stopped and is running again.

Unchanged ads are not returned and not charged, so daily monitoring of large advertisers stays cheap. The summary row per advertiser shows newThisRun, stoppedThisRun and the current activeAdCount. Use a different monitorStoreName for each independent watchlist. Set emitBaselineOnFirstRun to false if the first run should only save the baseline without returning ads.

How it works

The Actor calls the same public JSON endpoints that the Transparency Center website uses (search, advertiser and creative lookups), without a browser. It reads ad text from the creative preview (responsive ads, video ads, Shopping ads) or, for text ads archived as images, with OCR. It uses Apify Proxy with session rotation, retries with backoff, falls back to residential IPs only if needed, and isolates errors per target and per ad. One bad input never stops the run.

Measured on the Apify platform (October 2026) with the default settings:

Test	Result
Stress run: 20 advertisers of very different sizes (Nike, Temu, Shein, Booking.com, Airbnb, Canva, Duolingo, Salesforce, Shopify...), domains and URLs with region filters (DE, JP, BR, IN, FR, GB), up to 50 ads each	20/20 targets, 1,000/1,000 ads with full details, 94% of ads with extracted text (the rest are pure image banners)
Speed	~1,000 ads with details and OCR in about 5 minutes (2 GB memory)
Monitoring (4 consecutive runs, 3 competitors)	baseline, then only changes (e.g. 1 new Zalando ad)

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing: you pay per ad returned, plus a small fee per run.

Event	Price
Ad result (ad-result): one ad creative with details and extracted text	$1.50 per 1,000 ads ($0.0015 per ad)
Actor start (actor-start)	$0.001 per run

Summary rows, error rows, retries and failed requests are free. In monitoring mode you pay only for NEW and STOPPED ads. Proxy and compute costs are included. Set Maximum cost per run in the run options to cap your spend. The Actor stops cleanly at the limit and keeps everything it scraped so far.

Related tools

Competitor research: their ads, their keywords, their authority and traffic, and their AI search presence.

• Keyword Search Volume (Google Keyword Planner): search volume, CPC and keyword ideas in bulk
• Domain Authority & Traffic Checker: bulk domain authority, backlinks and organic traffic
• AI Search Visibility Tracker: check if ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews mention your brand

All of these are maintained by the same developer and export flat JSON, CSV or Excel, so you can feed one tool's dataset into the next.

FAQ

What is the Google Ads Transparency Center? It is Google's public library of ads run on Google Search, YouTube, Shopping, Display, Maps and Play by verified advertisers. You can browse it at adstransparency.google.com. This Actor turns it into structured data.

Is there an official Google Ads Transparency Center API? No, Google does not offer a public API for it. (Google publishes political ads in BigQuery, but not commercial ads.) This Actor works as an API: call it from the Apify API, Python/JS clients, Make, Zapier, n8n or the Apify MCP server.

How do I find an advertiser ID? Open the advertiser in the Transparency Center. The URL contains /advertiser/AR.... You can also just enter the brand name or website domain. The Actor finds the advertiser and reports how it matched in matchedBy.

Why do some text ads have textSource: "ocr"? Google archives most Search text ads only as images. The Actor reads them with OCR, which is very accurate for English and other Latin-script ads. ocrConfidence shows the confidence. The previewImageUrl always shows the original ad.

Why are impressions and targeting empty for some ads? Google only publishes impression ranges, per-platform data and targeting for ads shown in the EU/EEA. Choose an EU region (e.g. Germany) to get them.

Can I search by keyword? The Transparency Center itself can only be searched by advertiser or website, not by ad keyword. Use advertiser names or domains as targets, then filter the extracted ad text.

How many ads can I get? As many as the Transparency Center lists for the advertiser. Large brands have tens of thousands. Use maxAdsPerTarget, region, date and format filters to focus on what you need.

Is it legal to scrape the Google Ads Transparency Center? The Actor only collects ads and advertiser information that Google publishes for public transparency, without logging in. Google's Terms of Service restrict automated access to its services, and laws differ by country and use case. Make sure your use complies with them. If you're unsure, ask a lawyer.

Acceptable use

• This Actor is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google or DataForSEO. DataForSEO is only used as an optional backup data source.
• Don't use the data to build a competing search engine, or otherwise to compete with or harm Google or the other search engines the data comes from.
• The Actor may not be used from, or for people or organizations in, Russia, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Myanmar, North Korea, Crimea or the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.
• You are responsible for using the results lawfully, including privacy laws such as GDPR for any personal data they contain.