Google Advertiser Verifier 🕵️ (real company behind the ads)

Find out who is actually paying for a Google ad, and whether they are a real company. Give it a brand name, a landing domain or an Ads Transparency Center advertiser ID and it comes back with the advertiser record Google publishes, the matching legal entity in the official French, British or German company register, whether that entity is still trading or in insolvency, a sanctions screen, and a confidence score that shows its workings.

It answers the question a transparency page never does: the Center will tell you that "Asos.com Limited" bought 80,000 ads, but not that the company number is 03584121, that it was incorporated in June 1998, or that it is still active.

No API key. Flat price per advertiser, platform usage included. Duplicate rows collapse before you are billed, so you can paste a whole ad export in and pay once per advertiser rather than once per ad.

Two tools, and the gap between them

Ad intelligence and company verification are sold separately, by different vendors, to the same person. AdSpy is $149 a month and shows you the creatives. A Dun & Bradstreet business information report starts at $139.99 for one company and tells you whether the company is real and solvent. Neither one joins the two sides, so the answer to "is this advertiser a company that still exists" is a manual job somebody does in two browser tabs.

That join is what this actor sells, per advertiser, with no subscription.

Question	Ad-intel subscription (AdSpy, $149/month)	Company report (D&B, from $139.99 per company)	Ad-library scrapers on the Store	This actor
Which ads is this advertiser running, and how recently?	yes	no	yes	yes, a sample plus Google's own ad-count bracket
Registered legal name and registration number	no	yes	no	yes, SIREN / UK company number / HRB
Still trading, dissolved, or in insolvency	no	yes	no	yes, register status plus BODACC, The Gazette, Insolvenzbekanntmachungen
Sanctions screen	no	sold separately	no	yes, OFAC SDN, UN, EU, UK OFSI, US Consolidated Screening List
Advertising while closed	no	no	no	yes, that is the flag this actor exists for
Cost of checking 40 advertisers once	$149 for the month	roughly $5,600 in single reports	ads only	40 rows, paid per advertiser

The D&B figures are its own published self-serve prices for a single Business Information Report; both vendors answer questions this actor does not, and the claim here is narrow: for the specific question "who is behind this ad and are they still a company", one run does it.

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What you get, per advertiser

Field	What it tells you
verdict	One sentence a non-technical colleague can act on
confidence, confidenceBand	0-100, plus verified / likely / uncertain / unverified
riskFlags	advertising-while-closed, insolvency, closed, sanctions, no-registry-match, country-mismatch, stale-ads and friends
advertiserId, advertiserName, advertiserLegalName	The Center's advertiser record and the legal name Google holds for it
advertiserCountry, identityVerified	Home country, and whether the Center carries an identity-verification record
adCountLower, adCountUpper	Google's own published ad-count bracket, not a guess
firstAdSeen, lastAdSeen, daysSinceLastAd, stillAdvertising	How recently the money was actually being spent
adFormats, landingDomains, adSampleRegion	What kind of ads, where they point, which market was measured
otherAdvertisers	Namesakes, or everyone else buying ads for the same domain
registry, registryId, registryIdType	SIRENE (FR), Companies House (UK), Handelsregister (DE) and the number
legalName, tradingName, legalForm, activityCode	The registered entity
incorporationDate, dissolutionDate, companyStatus	Age and whether it still exists
registeredAddress, registeredCity, registeredPostalCode	Registered office
officers, employeesRange	Directors and size band, where the register publishes them
matchScore, matchType, matchAlternatives, registryNote	How sure the name match is, and what else was close
insolvencyStatus, insolvencyHits, insolvencySource	BODACC, The Gazette or Insolvenzbekanntmachungen
sanctionsStatus, sanctionsHits, sanctionsListsScreened	OFAC SDN, UN, EU, UK OFSI, US Consolidated Screening List
sectionsCompleted, sectionsSkipped	Which checks ran, which did not, and exactly why
confidenceBreakdown, confidenceReasons	Every point the score is made of, in plain English

Nothing is ever silently partial

Four independent sources answer each row, and any one of them can be having a bad day. When that happens the row still ships, it names the section that was skipped and the reason, and the confidence score is rescaled over the checks that actually ran instead of quietly docking points for evidence nobody could collect. confidenceOutOf tells you the raw denominator. A run where Google rate-limited us still gives you every register, insolvency and sanctions answer, and says so in adsSkipReason.

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Three ways to ask

A brand name. "Zalando" finds the advertiser Google publishes under that name, preferring the one in the country you named and, failing that, the one actually spending the money. A name that is not close enough to any advertiser is refused rather than guessed at, and the register is then searched with your own words.

A landing domain. "made.com" is settled by the ads that point at the domain, not by a text search over advertiser names, which is how you learn that the ads landing on made.com today are bought by Next PLC.

An advertiser ID. "AR15589870916631265281" goes straight to the record.

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Use cases

Ad-fraud and brand-safety teams. Pull the advertisers bidding on your brand terms with Google Ads Transparency Scraper, pipe the dataset in here, and get back which of them are real registered companies, which are dissolved shells still running ads, and which appear on a sanctions list.

Publishers and ad networks vetting demand partners. A company number, an incorporation date and an insolvency check before you extend credit to an advertiser you have never heard of.

Competitive intelligence. Who owns the entity outspending you, when it was incorporated, how many employees it declares, and whether the ad account belongs to the parent or to a local subsidiary.

Due diligence and journalism. A defensible trail from an ad you saw to a registration number in an official register, with the match score and the runners-up shown.

Lead qualification. An advertiser that has spent money in the last 90 days is a company with a marketing budget. Sort by stillAdvertising and adCountUpper.

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Input examples

Paste any of these straight into the Input tab.

Three well-known European advertisers, three ways of naming them:

{
  "advertisers": [
    { "advertiserName": "Zalando", "country": "DE" },
    "asos.com",
    { "advertiserName": "Doctolib", "country": "FR" }
  ]
}

A whole ad export from the Ads Transparency Scraper, deduplicated and billed once per advertiser, scoped to ads served in France:

{
  "advertisersDatasetId": "PASTE_THE_DATASET_ID_HERE",
  "adRegion": "FR",
  "maxAdvertisers": 200
}

A fast pass with no insolvency or sanctions work, for a first look at a long list:

{
  "advertisers": ["zalando.de", "asos.com", "otto.de", "boohoo.com"],
  "checkInsolvency": false,
  "screenSanctions": false
}

A CSV from your own system, with your own column names:

{
  "advertisersCsvUrl": "https://example.com/advertisers.csv",
  "defaultCountry": "GB",
  "minMatchScore": 90
}

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Sources

Every source is an official register or the platform's own transparency surface. There is no scraped third-party database anywhere in the chain, and none of them needs an API key.

Check	Source
Advertiser record, ad volume, ad dates	Google Ads Transparency Center
Company register, France	SIRENE and the RNE, via recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr
Company register, United Kingdom	Companies House (public search, or your own free API key)
Company register, Germany	Handelsregister, the Registerportal
Insolvency, France	BODACC
Insolvency, United Kingdom	The Gazette
Insolvency, Germany	Insolvenzbekanntmachungen
Sanctions	OFAC SDN and ALT, UN Consolidated, EU FSF, UK OFSI, US Consolidated Screening List

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FAQ

Which countries can you verify the company in? France, the United Kingdom and Germany today. Advertisers registered anywhere else still get the full Ads Transparency section, and the row says plainly that no register is covered for that country rather than pretending otherwise.

How do you know which company register to search? Google publishes a home country for each advertiser, which is the country whose identity check the advertiser passed. That routes the lookup. A country you state yourself is used as the fallback and as a tiebreaker between namesakes, and a disagreement between the two shows up as country-mismatch.

What is an Ads Transparency Center advertiser ID? The AR… identifier in the URL of an advertiser page on adstransparency.google.com. It is the most precise thing you can hand this actor, and it is what our Google Ads Transparency Scraper puts in every row it produces.

Can I check advertisers I found with another scraper? Yes. Give it a dataset ID or a CSV link and it picks the advertiser name, company name, website or domain out of the usual field names by itself.

Do I pay once per ad or once per advertiser? Once per advertiser. A 5,000-row ad export usually contains a few dozen distinct advertisers, and the duplicates are collapsed before anything is billed.

What does the confidence score actually mean? How sure we are that the entity buying these ads is a real, currently-trading company we can name. It is built from the register match, whether the company is still alive, whether Google publishes it as an advertiser with recent ads, and whether the addresses agree. confidenceReasons lists every point.

Why is one advertiser "verified" and another only "likely"? Usually because the register holds more than one company with a very similar name. When that happens the score is capped, matchAlternatives shows the rivals and the verdict tells you to look. Adding a town or a postcode to the row usually settles it.

Does a sanctions hit lower the confidence score? No, and deliberately. A sanctioned company is a perfectly well-identified, perfectly alive company. It rides in riskFlags and in the verdict, where you can filter on it, instead of muddling a number that means something else.

Do I need a Companies House API key? No. UK advertisers are checked through the free public company search. Your own key, which is free, adds SIC codes and richer status data. It is never stored and we never charge you for a Companies House lookup.

What happens if Google rate-limits the run? The registers, insolvency sources and sanctions lists still answer, every affected row carries the reason in adsSkipReason and sectionsSkipped, and the confidence score is rescaled so a throttled Google does not demote a perfectly verified company. Rows where nothing at all answered are not billed.

Is this GDPR-friendly? The company registers, the insolvency gazettes and the sanctions lists are all official public sources published for exactly this purpose. Director names come from the register's own public record.

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Related actors

• Google Ads Transparency Scraper gets you every ad an advertiser runs, with creatives and dates. Its output pipes straight into this actor.
• B2B Lead Verifier does the register, insolvency and sanctions checks on a lead list that has nothing to do with advertising, and uses the same field names, so the two datasets join.
• Sanctions Screener if the sanctions screen is the only part you need.
• French Company KYC, German Company KYC and Companies House Monitor for deeper single-country work.

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Google Ads Transparency Center, advertiser verification, advertiser lookup, ad spender background check, who owns this ad, Google advertiser ID, ad fraud detection, brand safety, demand partner vetting, KYC for advertisers, SIREN lookup, Companies House lookup, Handelsregister lookup, BODACC, The Gazette insolvency, Insolvenzbekanntmachungen, OFAC SDN screening, EU sanctions list, UK OFSI, competitor ad spend, landing domain owner.