Google Ads Transparency Center Scraper API - Competitor Ads

See every ad a competitor runs through Google — Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping and Maps — straight from Google's own Ads Transparency Center, and export it as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it from the API.

⚡ Give a brand name or a domain — no ids to look up. For every ad you get the creative itself (the image URL, or Google's render for a video), the format, the advertiser's verified name, the first and last day it ran, and its page on the Transparency Center. Turn on full details and each ad also carries the impression range Google reports, the ad category, and a per-country breakdown — impressions and run dates for each of the countries the ad appeared in. Filter by country, by format and by the dates an ad started or stopped running, so you can isolate exactly what a competitor launched last month or quietly killed. No login, no cookies, no browser. Pay per result.

🎯 Why scrape the Ads Transparency Center?

• Competitive ad research: pull a competitor's entire live ad set, see which creatives they keep running for months and which they dropped after a week.
• Creative inspiration and swipe files: download the image of every display ad, and keep Google's render of every video ad, with the date range each one ran.
• Spend and reach proxies: Google publishes an impression range per ad and per country. It is not a spend figure, but it is the closest public signal of which creatives a brand actually puts weight behind.
• Market entry and localisation: the per-country breakdown shows which markets a brand advertises in, when it started there, and whether it is still active.
• Agency pitches and audits: walk into a pitch with the prospect's own ad history, their categories, and how their rivals compare.
• Monitoring: put the Actor on a schedule with First shown after set to the start of the period you care about, and get only the ads launched since.
• Ad-tech and research datasets: build a dated corpus of creatives, categories and impression bands across a whole sector.

📊 What data does it extract?

Ads — one row per creative

Field	Description
creativeId, url	Google's id for the ad and its page on the Transparency Center
advertiserId, advertiserName, advertiserUrl	The verified advertiser behind the ad
format	image, video or text
imageUrl, widthPx, heightPx	Direct link to the image of an image ad, and its size
previewUrl	Google's own render, for video and rich ads
firstShown, firstShownDate, lastShown, lastShownDate	When the ad started and last ran
country, matchedInput	The country the run was scoped to, and the input the row came from

With Full details on, every row additionally carries:

• impressionsMin, impressionsMax — the impression range Google reports for the ad.
• adCategory, adCategoryId — the category Google files it under, e.g. Apparel & Accessories.
• countriesShownIn[] — one entry per country, each with its own impression range and its own first and last run dates.
• countryCount, platformCount — how many countries and how many Google surfaces the ad ran on.

Advertisers — one row per advertiser

advertiserId, advertiserName, advertiserCountry (the country Google verified them in), adsMin and adsMax (how many ads they are running), isVerified, url. Useful to pick the right legal entity before a big run: searching Booking.com matches ten advertisers, and this mode shows you which one runs 16 million ads and which one runs eleven.

🚀 How to use it

1. Put one or more advertisers in: a brand name (Booking.com), a domain (nike.com), a Transparency Center link, or an advertiser id. Brand names are matched against Google's verified advertisers; domains are searched directly in the ads.
2. Choose the data type: creatives (every ad) or advertisers (the identity card and ad volume of whoever matches).
3. Pick a country, or leave Worldwide.
4. Turn on Full details if you want impressions, categories and the per-country breakdown.
5. Narrow with ad formats and the first shown / last shown dates.
6. Set Max rows (100 prefilled, 0 = no limit) — you pay per row, and a large advertiser runs tens of thousands of ads.
7. Click Start, then export from the Storage tab as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or read the dataset from the API.

📥 Input parameters

Field	Key	Type	Default	Description
Advertisers	advertisers	array	["nike.com"]	Brand names, domains, Transparency Center URLs or advertiser ids.
Data type	dataType	select	creatives	creatives or advertisers.
Country	country	select	Worldwide	Every country by name. Scopes which ads count.
Full details	includeDetails	boolean	false	Adds impressions, ad category and the per-country breakdown. One extra request per ad.
Ad formats	formats	select (multiple)	all	image, video, text.
First shown after	firstShownAfter	date	none	Only ads that started on or after this date.
Last shown before	lastShownBefore	date	none	Only ads last seen on or before this date.
Max ads per advertiser	maxAdsPerAdvertiser	integer	0	Per-advertiser cap. 0 = no cap.
Max rows for the run	maxItems	integer	100	Hard stop across every input. 0 = no limit.
Flatten nested fields	flatten	boolean	false	One text column per field, for clean CSV / Excel.
Report what each input returned	emitInputStatus	boolean	true	Adds input_status to the run's OUTPUT record.
Proxy	proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	On by default; the Transparency Center paces how many requests one IP may send, so rotation keeps long runs steady.

📤 Output example

{
  "type": "creative",
  "creativeId": "CR05547927024246456321",
  "advertiserId": "AR18378488041124659201",
  "advertiserName": "Nike Retail BV",
  "format": "image",
  "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/1195506655557789793",
  "widthPx": 381,
  "heightPx": 105,
  "firstShownDate": "2025-10-22",
  "lastShownDate": "2026-10-17",
  "impressionsMin": 125000,
  "impressionsMax": 150000,
  "adCategory": "Apparel & Accessories",
  "countryCount": 11,
  "countriesShownIn": [
    { "country": "Spain", "impressionsMin": 125000, "impressionsMax": 150000,
      "firstShownDate": "2025-10-22", "lastShownDate": "2026-10-17" },
    { "country": "Portugal", "impressionsMin": null, "impressionsMax": 1000,
      "firstShownDate": "2025-10-22", "lastShownDate": "2026-10-09" }
  ],
  "url": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR18378488041124659201/creative/CR05547927024246456321",
  "country": "France",
  "matchedInput": "nike.com"
}

💡 Ready-to-run examples

1. Every ad a competitor is running right now

{ "advertisers": ["booking.com"], "includeDetails": true, "maxItems": 500 }

2. What did they launch recently?

{
  "advertisers": ["Nike"],
  "firstShownAfter": "2026-01-01",
  "maxItems": 2000
}

Dates and formats are pushed to the Transparency Center's own filters, so this reads only the ads that can match instead of the advertiser's whole history.

3. What did they stop running?

{ "advertisers": ["Salesforce"], "lastShownBefore": "2026-09-01" }

4. Video ads only, in one market

{
  "advertisers": ["nike.com"],
  "formats": ["video"],
  "country": "Germany",
  "includeDetails": true
}

5. Which legal entity should I track?

{ "advertisers": ["Booking.com"], "dataType": "advertisers" }

6. A whole competitive set in one run

{
  "advertisers": ["nike.com", "adidas.com", "newbalance.com"],
  "maxAdsPerAdvertiser": 200,
  "includeDetails": true
}

💰 Pricing

Pay per result, no subscription and no platform usage added on top: $2.00 per 1,000 rows, with lower rates on higher Apify plans. A row is one ad or one advertiser. So a competitor's 500 live ads cost $1.00, and a 10,000-ad sweep costs $20. Set Max rows on your first runs to keep every run predictable.

⚙️ Performance and limits

• No browser, no login, no cookies — the Actor reads the Transparency Center's own public data feed, 40 ads per request.
• Rate limiting is handled with automatic back-off and IP rotation through Apify Proxy; a single IP can only ask for so much.
• Honest reporting. The input_status report in OUTPUT lists, per input: how many rows it returned, which advertiser a brand name resolved to, which other advertisers matched that same name, how many pages were read, and why anything came back empty.
• Long runs stay safe. The Actor watches the run timeout and finishes cleanly with the data already collected, and it respects your max-cost-per-run setting.
• Filters by date and format are sent to the Transparency Center itself, so a narrow request reads only the ads that can match: asking for one brand's video ads takes a couple of requests rather than a sweep of its entire back catalogue. The exact date boundaries are applied on the results, because the site filters on the days an ad was running rather than the day it started.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a Google account? No. The Transparency Center is public and the Actor never signs in.

Is the impression number a spend figure? No. Google publishes a range of impressions per ad and per country, not spend and not clicks. It tells you which creatives carry weight relative to each other — treat it as a signal, not an invoice.

Why does a brand name match several advertisers? Large brands run ads through several verified legal entities (country subsidiaries, agencies). Google's own suggestions are not ordered by relevance, so the Actor picks the entity that actually carries the name and runs the most ads — searching Nike gives you Nike, Inc. and its thousands of ads, not the unrelated one-ad advertiser Google happens to list first. The runners-up are listed with their ad volume in input_status, and you can always pass an advertiser id to pin one exactly. A domain that matches no advertiser at all is searched in the ads themselves.

Why do some ads have no category or no country breakdown? Google only publishes those for part of its inventory. The fields are simply absent on those rows rather than guessed.

Can I get the ad's landing page URL? Not from this data — Google does not publish the destination URL in the Transparency Center. You get the creative, its dates, its impressions and its countries.

Is there an official bulk alternative? Yes, and it is worth knowing: Google publishes a BigQuery public dataset covering the EEA and Turkey. It needs a Google Cloud account and SQL, and it is not live per advertiser. This Actor is for pulling one advertiser, today, into a spreadsheet or a pipeline without any of that setup.

Is this legal? The Actor reads only the public transparency data Google publishes for everyone, which exists precisely so ads can be inspected. You are responsible for using the output in compliance with applicable laws and Google's terms.

🔗 Related scrapers

Trustpilot · Capterra · Bilibili · Airbnb · Glassdoor · Indeed · Upwork

💬 Support

Found a bug, a missing field, or an advertiser that returns nothing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab with your input and the run id.