Google Ads Transparency Scraper – Competitor Ads by Website

This Google Ads Transparency scraper reads the public Ads Transparency Center and hands you one row per ad: who ran it, whether it is a text, image or video ad, when it was first and last shown, how many days it ran, the website it promotes, the image where the listing carries one, and a link to the ad on the Transparency Center. Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps and Play ads are all there, and you can narrow a run by country, platform, format and dates.

Give it a website, an advertiser's name, an advertiser ID or an Ads Transparency Center link.

What it does

Every line of input is one search:

• A website such as nike.com returns every advertiser that promotes it. This is the best way to get a brand's ads: for nike.com in the United States the first page held Nike, Inc., Nike Retail BV and three resellers, which a search by one advertiser's name would never show.
• An advertiser's name such as Nike, Inc. is looked up on the Transparency Center and must match exactly, ignoring case and punctuation. The Transparency Center matches names loosely - its first answer for "nike" is a one-ad account in Kenya called "Nike" - so a name that matches nobody delivers nothing, costs nothing, and the log lists the advertisers whose names start that way, with their IDs. Where several accounts share the exact name (three are called "Nike, Inc."), all of them are searched.
• An advertiser ID (AR followed by digits) or a Transparency Center link is used as given.

Duplicates are removed: an ad is delivered, and charged for, once per run, under the first line that found it - nike.com and Nike, Inc. return largely the same ads. Lines are read about a hundred ads per request, and maxAdsPerSearch stops each line where you want it.

Field	What goes in it
advertiser_id, advertiser_name	The account that ran the ad, as the Transparency Center publishes it.
creative_id	The ad's own ID (CR followed by digits).
format	text, image or video.
first_shown, last_shown	ISO 8601, UTC. A last_shown from today or yesterday means the ad is still running.
days_shown	Days on which the ad was shown, as the Transparency Center counts them.
domain	The website the ad promotes. Set when the line was a website.
image_url, image_width, image_height	The ad's image, when the listing itself carries a static one. null otherwise.
preview_url	The script the Transparency Center uses to draw the ad.
ad_url	The ad's own page on the Ads Transparency Center, where anyone can see it.
search_term, search_type	The line you gave and how it was read: domain, advertiser or name.
region, platform	The filters the run used (anywhere, any when none).
total_ads_min, total_ads_max	How many ads match the search in total, as a range - the Transparency Center's own count, across every page, not only the ones delivered.
scraped_at	ISO 8601 UTC, when the row was read.

Who it is for

• Competitive research: every ad a competitor is running now, and when each one started.
• Agencies building a creative library before a pitch, or watching a client's rivals.
• Brand protection: advertisers you do not know promoting your website - resellers and worse.
• Market research: how many ads a whole category of websites runs, by country and platform.

How to use it

1. Put one website, name, advertiser ID or Transparency Center link per line in Websites, advertisers or advertiser IDs.
2. Choose a Country, Platform and Ad format if you want only some ads, and dates if you want a window.
3. Set Maximum ads per search term - a large brand runs thousands of ads.
4. Run it, and download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Input example

{
  "searchTerms": ["nike.com", "Nike, Inc.", "AR16735076323512287233"],
  "region": "US",
  "platform": "youtube",
  "adFormat": "video",
  "startDate": "2026-08-01",
  "endDate": "2026-09-29",
  "maxAdsPerSearch": 200
}

Output example

{
  "search_term": "nike.com",
  "search_type": "domain",
  "advertiser_id": "AR16735076323512287233",
  "advertiser_name": "Nike, Inc.",
  "creative_id": "CR05867015907196272641",
  "format": "text",
  "first_shown": "2026-05-05T16:30:04Z",
  "last_shown": "2026-09-30T04:32:54Z",
  "days_shown": 120,
  "domain": "nike.com",
  "image_url": null,
  "image_width": null,
  "image_height": null,
  "preview_url": "https://displayads-formats.googleusercontent.com/ads/preview/content.js?client=ads-integrity-transparency&...",
  "ad_url": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233/creative/CR05867015907196272641?region=US",
  "region": "US",
  "platform": "any",
  "total_ads_min": 700,
  "total_ads_max": 800,
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-30T10:28:41+00:00"
}

Pricing

Event	Price
Ad delivered (one dataset row)	$0.001, which is $1.00 per 1,000 ads
Actor start	$0.00005 per GB of run memory, charged once per run

Worked example: the most recent 500 ads for each of 10 competitors' websites is 5,000 ads, so 5,000 x $0.001 = $5.00 plus one start event. Users on paid Apify plans pay less per ad.

You pay only these event prices; Apify compute is not billed to you separately. A name that matches no advertiser, a search with no ads, and a line the site could not answer produce no rows and cost nothing. If you set a maximum cost per run, no row past that cost is ever delivered or charged for.

FAQ

Where does the data come from?

From the Ads Transparency Center, the public library where Google publishes the ads advertisers run. The scraper reads the same logged-out pages anyone can open in a browser. No account, no login, no API key.

Why did my name search return nothing?

Because no advertiser has exactly that name. The log lists the advertisers whose names start that way, with their IDs - run again with the one you meant, or search the website instead, which catches every account that promotes it.

Why is there no headline or body text for text and video ads?

The Transparency Center draws those ads with a separate script of about 170 KB per ad, and reading it for every row would cost far more than the row. Each row links to the ad's own page instead (ad_url), and carries the image wherever the listing has one.

What does days_shown count?

The days on which the ad was shown, as the Transparency Center reports them. It can be lower than the gap between first_shown and last_shown, because an ad can pause and come back.

Why did my run stop early?

If the Ads Transparency Center answers with a CAPTCHA page, the run stops there. Every ad already delivered is kept, and the rest is not retried from another address - that would be working around a site's request to slow down, which this scraper never does. Run the remaining lines later.

Limits

• 100 search terms per run and 10,000 ads per search term.
• Ads come about a hundred per request, and a run makes at most 30 requests a minute.
• Per-country breakdowns and impression ranges are not included; each ad's page on the Transparency Center shows them.
• A text or video ad's words are not decoded (see the FAQ). Image URLs are included when the listing carries a static image.
• Advertiser names must match exactly. Websites and advertiser IDs have no such limit.

Compliance

Ads and advertiser names as the Ads Transparency Center publishes them, for anyone to see. You are responsible for using the data lawfully.

Questions, bug reports and feature requests go on this actor's Issues tab. Business owners can send data-removal requests to info@locomint.io; that address is for removal requests only. This actor keeps no copy of what it reads between runs, so each run returns what the Transparency Center shows at that moment.

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