Free Google Ads Transparency Scraper — Ad History & Spy

The free Google Ads Transparency Center scraper. Pull every ad an advertiser is or has been running across Google Search, YouTube, Display, and Shopping in 50+ countries — text, image, and video creatives with full metadata.

Use it as a Google Ads Transparency tool for competitor ad intelligence, paid-search benchmarking, ad creative analysis, and brand monitoring without scraping Google yourself or fighting CAPTCHAs.

What you get

• All ad formats in one call — text (RSA), image / display, video
• Full creative content — headlines, descriptions, image URLs, YouTube thumbnails and video IDs, business address for local ads
• Per-region impressions with low / high ranges across Search, YouTube, Display, Maps, and Shopping placements
• Date ranges — first-shown, last-shown, total days running
• Political ad data — spend ranges and funding entities where Google discloses them
• Pagination — pull thousands of creatives across multiple runs
• Structured output — every dataset item is a flat JSON object you can pipe straight into a spreadsheet, BigQuery, or your own analytics

Why scrape the Google Ads Transparency Center

Google launched the Transparency Center in 2023 as a public ads library covering every advertiser worldwide. It's the most complete picture of what your competitors are running across Google's surface — but the UI gives you no export, no API, no bulk access, and aggressively rate-limits casual scrapers.

This Actor handles:

• The rotating proxies
• The reverse-engineered RPC endpoints
• Format-specific parsers (pla= protobuf for Shopping, WIZ data-p JSON for text ads, insertPreviewImageContent for video)
• Variation rollups and metadata enrichment

You get clean structured data instead of HTML.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
domain	string	—	Advertiser domain (e.g. redable.nl). One of domain, search, or advertiser_id is required
search	string	—	Free-text search by brand name
advertiser_id	string	—	Direct lookup by Google advertiser ID
creative_id	string	—	Direct lookup by creative ID. Requires advertiser_id
region	string (enum)	NL	ISO country code; 50+ supported
format	string (enum)	all	text, image, or video
start_date	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD lower bound for ad's last-shown date
end_date	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD upper bound
ads_count	integer	40	1-100 creatives per run
detail	boolean	false	Fetch impressions / regions / platforms / variations / spend per ad. Slower
political	boolean	false	Filter to political ads (includes spend where disclosed)
page_token	string	—	Pagination token from previous run's _next_page_token

Output (sample)

{
  "advertiser_id": "AR10129747575264247809",
  "creative_id": "CR12965115384414863361",
  "format": "image",
  "advertiser_name": "Example Retailer",
  "first_shown": "2026-01-08",
  "last_shown": "2026-03-14",
  "days_shown": 66,
  "target_domain": "example.com",
  "image_url": "https://encrypted-tbn.gstatic.com/shopping?q=tbn:...",
  "ad_text": "Premium running shoes — free shipping",
  "deeplink": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/.../creative/...",
  "region": "NL",
  "detail": {
    "impressions_low": 100000,
    "impressions_high": 1000000,
    "platforms": { "google_search": {}, "youtube": {} },
    "regions": [{ "region_code": "NL", "impressions_low": 100000 }]
  }
}

Use cases

Competitor ad spy and creative monitoring

Watch what your competitors put in market every week. Schedule this Actor weekly per domain, push the dataset to your warehouse, and diff new creatives against last week's run to surface new campaigns, killed creatives, and creative refresh patterns.

Paid-search and Shopping audit

Pull every Google Shopping creative a merchant runs to audit feed quality, missing GTINs, broken images, and pricing strategy across a category — the kind of intelligence an SEM team would otherwise pay hundreds of dollars per seat per month for an ad-spy SaaS to surface.

Brand-safety and policy enforcement

If you run an affiliate or partner program, pull every creative running under your brand domain and spot unauthorized partners, trademark infringement, or off-brand messaging in regions you don't directly manage.

Ad creative analysis at scale

Combine output with an LLM to cluster creatives by message, extract value props, identify USPs across a vertical, and benchmark your own creative against the field. Far cheaper than a competitive intelligence vendor.

Limits

• One advertiser per run. Multi-domain batch input is intentionally out of scope — orchestrate from your side or open multiple parallel runs
• Google rate-limits even through proxies. Zero items + the run's errors key-value entry pointing at a Google block = wait 30 minutes
• No OCR. Text inside ad images is not extracted in v1
• Political-ad spend only available where Google publishes it (mostly US, EU, India elections)

FAQ

Is there an official Google Ads Transparency API? No. Google publishes the Transparency Center as a web UI only. This Actor calls the same internal RPC endpoints the UI uses and parses the responses into structured JSON.

How is this different from the Meta Ads Library or TikTok Creative Center scrapers? This Actor covers Google's surface — Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Maps. For Meta and TikTok ad libraries, use the dedicated Actors.

Can I get historical impressions back further than 90 days? Yes. Google retains ad metadata for the lifetime of the creative; first_shown and last_shown reflect actual dates Google records, which can stretch back years for long-running campaigns.

Can I export to CSV? Yes — every Apify dataset can be exported to CSV, JSON, XML, Excel, or HTML directly from the run page or via the API.