Thanks for reporting this. What you're seeing is most likely a Google-side issue. This can happen with very recent ads (e.g. when filtering for “Today”). It seems the data sometimes takes a while to propagate across all of Google’s servers, so depending on timing and location, you might see different results.

For example, if you refresh the same Ads Transparency link in your browser multiple times, you may notice that sometimes it shows 0 ads and other times it shows 3.

Now that a few hours have passed since you created the ticket, if you rerun the same input, you should see those 3 results come through.

To avoid this type of inconsistency with fresh data, it might help to filter for “Yesterday” instead of “Today”.

Let me know if you’re still seeing issues, otherwise I’ll go ahead and close the ticket soon.

Hey Gustavo, thank you for the detailed reply!

What you built is pretty cool, and having built my own little chrome extension prior to their demand gen integration... I can appreciate the complexity and performance of your scraper!

That's great to know that about google and how it can return results. I ran "yesterday" and it is working just fine.

Do you know if there is a way to help mitigate the "0" or lesser results returned? or a way to pass session/cookie data from a google log in?

Thanks man, Adam

Thanks Adam.

There’s no reliable way to avoid the “0 results” issue when using the “Today” filter. It’s related to how Google caches and propagates fresh data across their servers.

Regarding session or cookie data - yes, it’s technically possible to provide them to the scraper. This can be useful if you're trying to access age-restricted ads or cases where logged-in users see more content. A quick way to test is to compare what you see while logged in vs Incognito mode. If you notice more ads when logged in, I can send instructions on how to pass session cookies. That said, I don’t generally recommend this approach because it may violate Google’s terms of service and could risk account termination.

ahh gotcha ok no stress man!

Do you know why sometimes the scrape will return 0 ads for All time or even older? when there are ads showing in the transparency url

https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR01478250932088078337?region=US&format=VIDEO

https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR01478250932088078337?region=US&format=VIDEO&preset-date=Yesterday

visiting both you'll see ads, but scraping returns 0

Thanks Gustavo!

In these examples the ads are marked as age-restricted, which means you only see them if you are logged in to a Google account. This scraper runs anonymously so it is unable to fetch these age-restricted ads.

You can find a detailed explanation here: https://apify.com/silva95gustavo/google-ads-scraper#why-am-i-missing-some-ads-in-the-results