UK ASA Ad Rulings Watchdog

Watches the Advertising Standards Authority's (ASA/CAP) public rulings register - the official, public record of every UK advertising complaint that reached a formal, published decision.

Every entry gives you:

• Advertiser (company / brand, exactly as the ASA names it)
• Outcome - Upheld / Not upheld / Partially upheld (when the register shows one)
• Medium - TV, radio, paid search, paid social, influencer post, poster, etc.
• Date published
• Plain-English summary of what was complained about
• Link to the full ruling (the ASA's own reasoning, evidence considered, and any action required of the advertiser)

Why this is useful

Marketing, legal, compliance and PR teams routinely need to know: has this advertiser (or my competitor, or my own client) had an ASA ruling against them? Brand-safety and compliance monitoring, competitor intelligence, and legal/regulatory teams checking a sector (gambling, weight loss, crypto, finance, alcohol, influencer marketing) all use this register manually today. This Actor turns the ASA's own public search into structured, scheduled, diffable data.

How it works

The ASA publishes its rulings at asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/rulings.html, with its own free, public search form (q=, sort_order=, date_period=/from_date=/to_date=, page=). robots.txt on asa.org.uk explicitly allows this path (it only disallows two unrelated paths: /type/*/code_rule/* and /account/*). This Actor sends the same GET requests a browser would, reads the same public HTML the ASA already serves to anyone, and parses the listing into rows. No login, no API key, no paywall, no rate-limit bypass.

Input

Field	Description
query	Free text (advertiser, brand, sector keyword, issue). Leave empty for the newest rulings on any topic.
sortOrder	recent (default, newest first) or relevant.
datePeriod	past_week / past_month / past_year, or leave empty.
fromDate / toDate	UK format DD/MM/YYYY, used only when datePeriod is empty.
watchLabel	Free-text tag copied onto every row - lets you tell several scheduled watches apart.
maxItems	Cap on rows returned (pages through the register until this is hit).

Output (one row per dataset item)

watch_label, status, advertiser, outcome, medium, date_published (ISO YYYY-MM-DD), date_published_raw (as shown on the site), summary, ruling_url, fetched_at, error.

status is ok for a real ruling row, or one of invalid_input / http_error / network_error / parse_error for a single explanatory row (these are not charged).

Pay-per-event

One charged event, ruling-found, fires once per ruling row (status: ok). Explanatory rows for bad input or a failed request are free.

Typical use

• Set query to your brand or a competitor's name, sortOrder: recent, schedule daily - get notified the day a new ruling against them publishes.
• Set query to a sector (gambling, crypto, weight loss, influencer) to monitor an entire category for compliance trends.
• Leave query empty with datePeriod: past_week to get every ruling published in the last week, across all sectors.