Google Ads Transparency Scraper API — Competitor Ad Monitor

A Google Ads Transparency Center scraper and competitor ads monitor. Give it advertiser IDs or domains; get back every ad Google publishes for them — text, image and video, first and last shown, days running, the creative image or preview, and a link to the ad's page on the Transparency Center. Switch on watch mode and schedule it: after the first run you get only the new ads your competitors launched. An ad library API for Google, pay per ad.

What it is for

• Competitive intelligence — see which ads a competitor is running on Google Search, YouTube and Display right now, and how long each one has run (an ad kept running for months is often one that works).
• New-ad alerts — schedule mode: "watch" daily or weekly; each run returns only ads that are new since the last one.
• Agencies and brand teams — who else advertises on your domain (resellers, affiliates, impersonators): a domain query returns every advertiser Google lists for it.
• Creative research — pull the archived creative images for a swipe file.

Quick start

Every recent ad for two advertisers (the default):

{ "advertisers": ["shopify.com", "notion.so"] }

Daily new-ad alerts for a competitor, in Germany only:

{
  "advertisers": ["AR01625195283841286145"],
  "region": "DE",
  "mode": "watch",
  "maxAdsPerAdvertiser": 100
}

The advertiser ID (AR…) is in the URL of the advertiser's page on adstransparency.google.com. A domain returns the ads Google lists for that domain, which can include other advertisers pointing at it — use the ID when you want one advertiser only.

Input

field	type	default	what it does
advertisers	string[]	required	Advertiser IDs (AR + 20 digits) or domains (https://, paths and www. are stripped). Duplicates read once; anything else is skipped and listed in RUN_SUMMARY
region	string	anywhere	Where the ads were shown: anywhere or an ISO country code (US, GB, DE, FR, …)
mode	scan | watch	scan	scan returns every ad read. watch returns the baseline on the first run, then only new ads
maxAdsPerAdvertiser	integer	50	How many of the most recently shown ads to read per advertiser or domain (max 1000)
stateStoreName	string	google-ads-transparency-state	Named key-value store that remembers which ads you have seen. One name per watchlist
requestDelayMs	integer	2000	Pause between requests. Never less than 2000

Output

One row per ad:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "target": "shopify.com",
  "region": "anywhere",
  "advertiserId": "AR01625195283841286145",
  "advertiserName": "Shopify Inc.",
  "creativeId": "CR01007377088853835777",
  "format": "text",
  "firstShown": "2024-01-10T08:00:00.000Z",
  "lastShown": "2026-09-26T07:08:58.000Z",
  "daysShown": 982,
  "domain": "shopify.com",
  "previewUrl": null,
  "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/4825728183040533272",
  "adUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR01625195283841286145/creative/CR01007377088853835777?region=anywhere",
  "changeType": "baseline",
  "message": null,
  "checkedAt": "2026-09-26T07:25:40.053Z"
}

• format is text, image or video. imageUrl is Google's archived creative image; previewUrl is Google's render script for text and video ads (open the adUrl to watch a video).
• changeType: baseline (first run for this advertiser and region), new (not seen before and first shown after your last run), known (seen before), resurfaced (not seen before, but first shown before your last run — it was just outside the ads read last time). Watch mode returns only new after the baseline.
• Status rows. An advertiser or domain with no ads, or one that failed, gets one row with status = no-ads, request-failed or shape-changed and a message. Status rows are never charged. The Run status dataset view lists them.
• A run summary is saved as RUN_SUMMARY in the run's key-value store.

Regions and impression bands per ad are not included: Google does not put them in its ad listing, and fetching them would take one extra request per ad.

What you pay for

event	price	when
Ad returned	$0.0015	one ad row written — $1.50 per 1,000 ads
New ad detected	$0.005	an ad is new since your last run. Never on the first (baseline) run

Apify Store discounts apply by subscription plan: the prices above are the Free-plan prices; Starter pays 10% less, Scale 20% less and Business 30% less on every event.

You are charged only after an advertiser's ads were read, written and remembered. Nothing is charged for a status row, a failed request, or — in watch mode — an ad you have already seen. The run stops at the spending limit you set; rows already saved are yours.

If Google changes its site

The Transparency Center has no public API; this Actor reads the same data Google's own page loads. If Google changes that, the Actor fails loudly: a shape-changed row per advertiser, an error in the log, and a failed run if nothing could be read — never a quiet empty dataset that looks like "no ads". If Google refuses requests (HTTP 403 or 429), the run stops at once and does not retry. We fix shape changes; open an issue with the run ID.

Data, privacy and legal notes

• Source. Google's Ads Transparency Center, the public ad repository Google publishes (for the EU, as the ad repository that DSA Art. 39 requires of very large online platforms). The data comes from the site's own endpoints, as the public page loads them, with no login. As of 2026-09-26 adstransparency.google.com publishes no robots.txt (it answers 404). The Actor makes one request at a time, at least 2 seconds apart, with an identifying User-Agent, and uses no proxies or rotated identities.
• Advertiser names. Google verifies advertisers and publishes their names. Some verified advertisers are individuals, not companies. This Actor emits only the advertiser ID and the name Google itself publishes — nothing else about the advertiser — and leaves the name empty when what Google publishes is an e-mail address. If you process these rows you are responsible for your own lawful basis under the data-protection law that applies to you.
• Ad creatives belong to their advertisers. Use them for research and monitoring, not republication.
• Nothing here is legal advice. Check Google's terms and your own use case.

FAQ

Where do I find an advertiser ID? Search the advertiser on adstransparency.google.com and copy the AR… part of the page URL. Or just give the domain.

Is this the Google Ads Transparency Center API? Google does not offer one. This Actor gives you the same data as JSON, CSV or Excel, and over the Apify API.

Can I get new-ad alerts? Yes: mode: "watch" plus an Apify schedule. Add an Apify integration (Slack, e-mail, webhook) on the dataset to be notified.

Does it cover YouTube and Display ads? The Transparency Center covers ads across Google's services, and this Actor returns what it lists, by format (text, image, video). It does not say which surface each ad ran on.

Why do domain results include other companies? Google lists every advertiser whose ads point at a domain. That is useful for spotting resellers and impersonators; use the AR… ID to see one advertiser only.

Can I export to CSV or Excel? Yes. The dataset downloads as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

Support

Use the Issues tab on this Actor. Include the run ID and the input you used.