Google Ads Scraper — Ads Transparency Center

What does Google Ads Transparency Center Scraper do?

It turns the Google Ads Transparency Center into a structured ad dataset. Search by brand name (Nike), advertiser website (nike.com) or advertiser ID (AR167350…) — or paste Ads Transparency Center URLs — and get every matching ad back as 60 typed fields: the ad's own copy, every creative variation, first/last shown dates, per-country reach by Google surface, the advertiser's verified legal identity, and for election ads who paid and how much.

No code and no login. Download as JSON, CSV or Excel, or stream straight into the API, an AI agent or an MCP client.

New to Apify? Sign up free and use the included monthly platform credit to try this Actor — no credit card needed.

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What data can you extract from the Google Ads Transparency Center?

Every record carries up to 60 fields. Groups marked with a toggle arrive when that input is on — all three are on by default, and every field is always present, null where the ad doesn't expose it.

Group	What you get
Ad & creative	id, creativeId, title, format (text / image / video), imageUrl, previewUrl, previewHtml, width, height, adUrl, advertiserUrl
Video ads (includeVideoDetails)	videoId, youtubeUrl, thumbnailUrl — a watchable link and real thumbnail where a YouTube video backs the ad (~6 in 10). For some of the rest, videoUrl is the served MP4 (a signed URL that expires within days)
Ad copy & destination (includeAdCopy)	headline, description, callToAction, displayUrl, and landingPageUrl where the creative exposes it. Also on each variants[] entry. Plus merchantName on Shopping ads and businessLocation where the ad carries a location extension
Every creative variation (includeDetails)	variantCount plus variants[] — each version's image or hosted preview with its own dimensions, so you see the whole rotation
Timing & placement	firstShown, lastShown, approxDaysShown (Google's own days-active number), regionCode, regionsShown[], matchedDomain, topicId
Reach by country & surface (includeDetails)	countryStats[] — per-country impression bounds, first/last shown and a platformStats[] split by Google surface — plus whole-ad impressionsLowerBound / impressionsUpperBound
Advertiser & election transparency (includeDetails)	advertiserName, advertiserLegalName, isVerifiedAdvertiser, advertiserLocation, advertiserTaxId, advertiserTotalAdsLowerBound / UpperBound, isPoliticalAd, spendLowerBound / spendUpperBound, and audienceSelection[] — the five targeting groups Google discloses, each with an included / excluded flag
Google Ads join keys	googleCustomerId, googleCreativeId, googleAdGroupId — Google's own ids for the creative, so a transparency row joins to the same creative in an advertiser's Google Ads reporting (80-100% of ads across live runs), plus googleVersionId where the preview declares one
Run & change tracking	source, searchKeyword, scrapedAt, detailFetched, contentHash, changeType (NEW / UPDATED / UNCHANGED / EXPIRED), isRepost, repostOfId, repostDetectedAt

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Key features

• 🔎 Search the way you think — brand name, advertiser website or advertiser ID, auto-detected. Comma-separate several, or paste Ads Transparency Center URLs.
• 🌍 222 countries and 5 Google surfaces, as multi-selects — any set of markets, and Google Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps or Play, in one run instead of one run per country.
• 🎚️ Format and date filters — text, image or video within a date range, applied at the source so you never pay for rows you filtered out.
• ✍️ The words on the ad — text ads come back as genuine text rather than a picture of text, per ad and per variation, so you can search, group and diff ad copy without running OCR over it first.
• 🎞️ Every creative variation — each version of an ad with its own image, preview and dimensions, not just the grid thumbnail — usually where the messaging tests are.
• 📊 Per-country reach, by surface — impression ranges per country, split by Google surface, so you see where attention is actually bought.
• 🏢 Verified advertiser identity — the legal name and location behind the brand, tying an ad to a real company.
• 🎬 Video ads you can actually watch — video ads carry no image in the ad library, only a preview script. This resolves the video ID, watch URL and thumbnail (~6 in 10; the rest stay null rather than guessing).
• 🔗 Join keys into Google Ads — every ad carries Google's own customer, creative and ad-group ids, so transparency data lines up with an advertiser's own campaign reporting instead of sitting in a separate silo.
• 📈 How big is their ad library? — every record carries the advertiser's total ad count, so you can size a rival's whole operation without paging thousands of rows.
• 🗳️ Election ads and EU disclosures others skip — one switch returns who paid (legal name and tax ID), spend and impression ranges, and all five targeting groups Google discloses, each flagged included or excluded.
• ♻️ Incremental "new ads only" monitoring — each scheduled run emits only what appeared or changed, so an ad simply still running is not re-emitted and not re-billed.
• 🔔 Notifications — Telegram, Slack, Discord or any webhook (n8n / Make / Zapier), so a competitor's new creative lands in your channel.
• 🔗 Clay and Notion, natively — paste a Clay webhook URL or a Notion integration token and every ad lands in your table as it is scraped. Notion columns are created for you, typed correctly, from an empty database.
• 🤖 AI-ready — compact mode and drop-empty output keep payloads small for LLMs and MCP tools.

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🚀 How to scrape the Google Ads Transparency Center

1. Open the Actor and enter a search — a brand (Nike), an advertiser website (nike.com) or an advertiser ID (AR16735076323512287233) — or paste Ads Transparency Center URLs.
2. Pick your countries, Google surfaces, ad format and date range, and set Max results.
3. Leave Fetch full ad details on for variations, reach and advertiser identity — or off for the fastest run.
4. (Optional) turn on incremental mode and a notification channel, then open Schedules.
5. Click Start — results stream into the Output tab as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull from the API.

Quick-start example input

{
  "query": "nike.com",
  "regions": ["US", "GB"],
  "platforms": ["youtube", "google_search"],
  "adFormat": "video",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Up to 100 video ads nike.com ran on YouTube and Google Search in the US and UK, each with its creative variations, shown dates and the countries it reached.

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Input

Configure it in the visual editor or pass JSON via the API. Every field has help text in the editor; the ones worth knowing are below.

🔎 Search

Field	Type	What it does
query	string	Brand name, advertiser website or advertiser ID — auto-detected. Comma-separate several; results are merged and de-duplicated.
startUrls	array	Ads Transparency Center URLs — advertiser page, single ad, or a search URL. Region is read from the URL when present.
maxResults	integer	Max ads to return (default 50, 0 = unlimited).
ignoreUrlFailures	boolean	Skip URLs that can't be interpreted instead of failing the run.

🎚️ Filters

Field	Type	What it does
regions	array	Only ads shown in these countries — 222 options, multi-select. Empty = worldwide.
platforms	array	Only these Google surfaces: Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play. Empty = all.
adFormat	enum	any, text, image or video.
dateFrom / dateTo	string	Shown-from / shown-until bounds, YYYY-MM-DD.
politicalAdsOnly	boolean	Switch to the election-ads surface: who paid, plus spend and impression ranges. Works with no query at all.

📄 Output & AI modes

• includeDetails — variations, per-country impressions, audience selection, advertiser identity (on by default).
• includeAdCopy — headline, description, call-to-action, display URL and landing page (on by default), as real text.
• includeVideoDetails — YouTube ID, watch URL and thumbnail for video ads.
• compact / excludeEmptyFields — core fields only, and drop nulls: lean AI/MCP payloads.

♻️ Incremental monitoring

• incrementalMode — tag every record NEW / UPDATED / UNCHANGED / EXPIRED.
• stateKey — stable name for the tracked search; derived from your settings if blank.
• emitUnchanged / emitExpired — also emit unchanged ads, or ads that have since disappeared.

🔔 Notifications

Telegram, Slack, Discord or any webhook — setup below. webhookHeaders adds your own headers to the generic webhook, and notificationLimit caps how many records go into each message.

⚙️ Advanced

• proxyConfiguration — standard Apify Proxy, on by default, leave it on. Nothing to configure, no premium add-on to buy. The source limits how fast one IP can read ad details: the same 300-ad job returns 100% of ads fully detailed in ~2 min with proxy on, versus 73% in ~8.5 min without.
• rotateProxyIps — a fresh proxy IP per request rather than one for the whole run (on by default). This is what lets large runs finish.
• maxRequestRetries / detailConcurrency — retry budget, and detail requests in parallel.

More example inputs

{
  "startUrls": ["https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233?region=US"],
  "includeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 0
}

{
  "query": "nike.com, adidas.com",
  "regions": ["DE"],
  "incrementalMode": true,
  "politicalAdsOnly": false,
  "slackWebhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/XXX/YYY/ZZZ"
}

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Output

Each dataset item is one ad. Fetch full ad details (on by default) adds variants[], countryStats[], platformStats[], audienceSelection[] and advertiser identity. A real record, abridged:

{
  "id": "CR13810034716822208513",
  "creativeId": "CR13810034716822208513",
  "advertiserId": "AR16735076323512287233",
  "advertiserName": "Nike, Inc.",
  "advertiserLegalName": "Nike, Inc.",
  "advertiserLocation": "US",
  "isVerifiedAdvertiser": true,
  "title": "Text ad by Nike, Inc.",
  "format": "text",
  "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/18098505553023330831",
  "width": 348,
  "height": 425,
  "firstShown": "2023-11-17T00:11:26+00:00",
  "lastShown": "2026-09-12T06:52:55+00:00",
  "approxDaysShown": 896,
  "matchedDomain": "nike.com",
  "regionCode": "US",
  "regionsShown": ["US"],
  "variantCount": 5,
  "variants": [
    { "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/18098505553023330831", "width": 348, "height": 425 },
    { "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/11076221599670432433", "width": 348, "height": 436 }
  ],
  "countryStats": [
    { "regionCode": "US", "regionId": 2840, "impressionsLowerBound": null, "impressionsUpperBound": null, "firstShown": null, "lastShown": "2026-09-01", "platformStats": [] }
  ],
  "isPoliticalAd": false,
  "adUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233/creative/CR13810034716822208513?region=US",
  "advertiserUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233?region=US",
  "source": "adstransparency.google.com",
  "searchKeyword": "nike.com",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-12T07:25:27.894320+00:00",
  "detailFetched": true,
  "contentHash": "7fe1b0d45d0ff40e474ce1749899f99db4a40919"
}

On the election-ads surface the record also carries spendLowerBound / spendUpperBound, impressionsLowerBound / impressionsUpperBound and advertiserTaxId. In incremental mode it carries changeType.

Ad copy and destination, added by includeAdCopy — four real ads, one per creative type:

[
  { "format": "text",  "headline": "Compra lo mejor y más nuevo",
    "description": "Descubre productos en Nike.com y compra en la página oficial de Nike.",
    "displayUrl": "nike.com",
    "businessLocation": "Nike Factory Store Malaga, Calle Antón García Abril, 6, Málaga, 29004, ES" },

  { "format": "image", "landingPageUrl": "https://www.nike.com/au/t/flex-train-mens-workout-shoes-VAQnVLTN/HV9972-303" },

  { "format": "image", "merchantName": "Nike Officiel",
    "headline": "Maillot de foot Replica Nike Dri-FIT Paris Saint-Germain 2026/27 Stadium Extérieur pour homme - Blanc - Taille: M" },

  { "format": "video", "callToAction": "INSTALL", "displayUrl": "itunes.apple.com",
    "landingPageUrl": "https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1094591345?mt=8",
    "videoUrl": "https://rr1---sn-uqj-j2ik.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1789490865&..." }
]

Every copy field is also on each variants[] entry, so you can tell which version says what.

Measured on live runs of 70 Nike ads: 80–88% of text ads return headline + description + display URL, and 93% of image ads return something readable (70% product title + merchant, 23% a landing page). Anything a creative doesn't expose comes back null, never guessed.

The Output tab ships three ready-made views: Overview, Creatives and Reach & spend.

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♻️ How to monitor the Google Ads Transparency Center with incremental mode

Schedule the Actor and turn on incremental mode: each run compares against the last and emits only NEW / UPDATED / EXPIRED ads. A one-shot scrape becomes a competitor-ad watch feed — you learn the day a rival launches a creative, and stop paying for the hundred they've run all year.

"Changed" means the creative content changed. A still-running ad gains a day and a newer last-shown date every day; those ticks are ignored, so an unchanged campaign is never re-emitted and never re-billed. After the baseline your cost scales with how fast the advertiser rotates creative, not with how often you watch:

Daily churn of 1,000 tracked ads	billable records	you save
5 %	50	95 %
15 %	150	85 %
30 %	300	70 %

Setting up scheduled monitoring

1. Configure your search, countries and surfaces, and turn on Incremental mode.
2. Run it once — this seeds the baseline.
3. Open the Schedules tab and set a recurring run (e.g. daily).
4. Add a notification channel so new creatives reach you without opening Apify.

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🔔 How to set up Google Ads Transparency Center alerts

Get pinged the moment a tracked advertiser publishes a new ad. Fill in only the channels you want:

Channel	What to configure
✈️ Telegram	telegramToken (from @BotFather) + telegramChatId
💬 Slack	slackWebhookUrl (Incoming Webhook URL)
🎮 Discord	discordWebhookUrl (channel webhook URL)
🪝 Webhook	webhookUrl receives structured JSON — ideal for n8n / Make / Zapier

Each message carries the ad's title, advertiser, change type and a direct link to the ad. Channels fire independently — a broken one can't stop the scrape or the others. Pair with incremental mode to hear only about genuinely new creatives.

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🔗 Send Google ads straight into Clay or Notion

This Actor writes into your table itself, row by row while the run is still going — no export step, no Zap. Both destinations work at once, both are optional, and neither can fail your run: a rejected token or an unreachable table is logged, the dataset is delivered in full, and the other destination keeps going.

Field	Type	What it does
clayWebhookUrl	string	A Clay table's webhook URL. One ad = one row.
clayAuthToken	string	Optional — only if the Clay webhook source has an auth token.
notionApiKey	string	A Notion internal-integration secret (ntn_…).
notionDatabaseId	string	The target database's URL or 32-character ID. One ad = one page.
notionCreateProperties	boolean	Create missing columns with the right Notion type (on by default), so an empty database builds itself.

🧱 Clay — one ad per row

Every ad arrives as its own row, so Clay's columns map straight onto the ad fields. Nested fields (regionsShown, countryStats, variants) arrive as JSON text a Clay formula column can parse.

Prefer to pull? Clay's native Apify integration can run this Actor from a Clay column — one domain per row in, ads out. Clay documents that setup here: Apify integration overview.

📓 Notion — one ad per page

The database can be completely empty: on the first run the Actor creates whatever columns are missing, each correctly typed — URL, date, number, select, multi-select, checkbox — and the creative becomes the page cover, so gallery view reads as a visual swipe file. Set notionCreateProperties to false to write only into columns you made yourself.

Do connect the database to your integration (⋯ → Connections), or Notion answers object_not_found. Notion's own guide covers creating the integration and granting it access: Create integrations with the Notion API.

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💡 What can you do with Google Ads Transparency Center data?

Reverse-engineer a competitor's ad strategy — and build a swipe file

Pull every creative a rival is running, with each variation and how long it has been live. approxDaysShown is the cheapest signal for what converts — the creatives they keep paying to run are the ones that work — and the same run doubles as an image-and-copy swipe file, filtered to video, image or text.

Map where a brand actually advertises

See which of the 222 markets an advertiser is live in, split by Google surface. Find a rival's expansion markets before the press release does.

Research election and issue advertising

Who paid for each political ad — legal name and tax ID — with spend and impression ranges per country: an auditable, exportable record.

Verify advertisers and investigate ad fraud

Tie a brand-name ad to the entity Google actually verified, so you can catch look-alike accounts running on your trademark.

Feed AI agents and LLM pipelines

Compact JSON straight into an LLM context, an MCP tool or a vector store — cluster creative themes, track rotation, score how a rival's mix shifts.

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💰 How much does it cost to scrape the Google Ads Transparency Center?

This Actor uses Apify's pay-per-event model: a small fee when a run starts, plus a per-record fee. See the Pricing tab for current numbers. Three things cut your bill further:

• Source-side filters — country, surface, format and date filters are applied before results are returned, so ads you filtered out are never fetched and never billed.
• Details off — when you only need the creative, dates and advertiser, each run does a fraction of the work.
• Incremental mode — after the baseline you pay only for creatives that actually changed.

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🔌 Integrations & export

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel or an HTML table, or pull from the REST API and the JavaScript / Python clients. Runs on a schedule, connects to Google Sheets, Slack, Make, Zapier and n8n, and works as an MCP tool for AI agents.

Built in, no middleman: Clay and Notion are written to directly, row by row, while the run is still going.

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🔗 Using the API

Run this Actor from your own code. Example with the Apify Python client:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

run_input = {
    "query": "nike.com",
    "regions": ["US"],
    "maxResults": 50,
    "includeDetails": True,
}

run = client.actor("corvuslab/google-ads-transparency-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["advertiserName"], item["format"], item["adUrl"])

It also works with the JavaScript/TypeScript client, the Apify CLI and the REST API.

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❓ FAQ

Do I need a Google account, a login or my own cookies? No — the Ads Transparency Center is public and this Actor reads only that public data. The standard Apify Proxy is on by default and needs no setup; leave it on, because the source limits how fast one IP can read ad details.

Can I search by brand name, or do I need an advertiser ID? All three work and the Actor detects which you gave it: a brand name (Nike) resolves to the matching verified advertisers, a website (nike.com) matches ads pointing at that domain, and an advertiser ID (AR…) goes straight there. Advertiser, single-ad and search URLs work too.

Why is there no ad copy on some ads? Ad copy comes from the creative itself, and not every creative exposes all of it. Anything it doesn't expose is null, never guessed.

Why are impressionsLowerBound, spendLowerBound and audienceSelection empty on most ads? Google discloses them only where a regulator requires it — EU/DSA disclosures and election ads. On an ordinary commercial ad those fields are legitimately null. Turn on Election ads only and the spend, impression and funder fields fill in.

How do I get spend data and who paid for an ad? Switch on politicalAdsOnly to read the election-ads surface: funder's legal name, tax ID where published, and spend plus impression ranges. Works with no search query — just pick countries.

Is approxDaysShown just the gap between first and last shown? No — it's Google's own days-active figure, which can differ because an ad can pause and resume. Shipped as reported, alongside raw firstShown / lastShown.

Why does one ad have five variants but the grid shows one image? The Transparency Center stores every version of a creative that ran under the same ad. variants[] returns all of them — usually where the messaging tests are.

Will incremental mode re-bill me for ads that are simply still running? No. Change detection hashes the creative, so a still-running ad counts as UNCHANGED and isn't emitted.

Is it good for AI agents? Yes — compact mode is MCP-friendly and drops empty fields, so an agent can reason over hundreds of ads in a small context. Export is JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML or straight from the API.

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⚖️ Is it legal to scrape the Google Ads Transparency Center?

This Actor collects only publicly available data — the ad library Google publishes for exactly this purpose, with no login behind it. You're responsible for how you use it, in particular personal information such as the funder details on election ads, and for complying with the site's terms and applicable law (including GDPR/LGPD). Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google LLC.

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