Google Ads Transparency Scraper - Competitor Ads by Domain

What does Google Ads Transparency Scraper do?

Enter competitors (name, advertiser ID or link) and/or domains, get one row per Google ad: advertiser, format, first and last shown, days shown, image and a link to the ad. $1.50 per 1,000 ads. Searches that fail or find nothing are free.

It reads Google's public Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com), the library where Google shows every ad a verified advertiser runs on Search, YouTube, Display, Maps and Play, and turns it into rows you can sort, filter and export:

• By advertiser: a name ("Nike, Inc.", "HubSpot"), an advertiser ID (AR...) or a Transparency Center link.
• By domain: canva.com returns the ads that send people to canva.com, from every advertiser.
• Filters: country the ad was shown in, format (text, image, video), date range or "last N days".
• Per ad: advertiser, format, first and last shown, days shown, target domain, the ad image (or video preview), and a link to the ad in the Transparency Center.
• Optional details: every image or video variation and each country the ad ran in, with the last date it ran there.
• Optional ad text: the headline, description and display URL of each ad as text. When Google's own ad preview data has them, they are copied exactly (adTextSource: "preview"); otherwise the ad picture is read with an AI vision model (adTextSource: "image-ocr").
• Monitoring: "Only ads not seen in earlier runs" returns just the new ads of your competitors on each scheduled run.

Real counts from a run on 3 October 2026 (region US): Nike, Inc. 7,000-8,000 ads, Shopify Inc. 8,000-9,000, HubSpot 600-700; ads pointing to canva.com 10,000-20,000, monday.com 7,000-8,000, zapier.com 600-700. The Actor returns the newest ones first, up to your limit, and puts Google's total in the run summary.

Honest by design. Requests identify themselves (TidyToolsAds/1.0 (+https://apify.com/tidytools)), are paced to about two per second, and use the same public data the Transparency Center web page loads. No login, no cookies, no proxies, no CAPTCHA solving. The site has no robots.txt rules against this (checked 3 October 2026). If Google refuses a request, the search is reported as blocked and not charged.

Use cases

• Competitor ad research: what is a competitor advertising right now, in which formats and countries, and since when?
• Ad copy ideas: the headline and description text of a competitor's search ads (with "Read the ad text").
• New-ad alerts: schedule a daily or weekly run with "Only ads not seen in earlier runs" and get only the new creatives, by e-mail, Slack, webhook or Google Sheets.
• Agency prospecting: is a prospect advertising on Google at all, and how much (Google's ad-count range per advertiser)?
• Market and brand-safety research: who advertises against a brand's domain, and in which countries.

How much does it cost?

Event	Price	When
Ad	$1.50 / 1,000 ads	one ad returned
Ad details	$2.00 / 1,000	optional: variations and countries with last-shown dates, charged only when they come back
Ad text	$4.00 / 1,000	optional: headline, description and display URL read from a text or image ad, charged only when text was found

Examples: the latest 100 ads of 10 competitors = 1,000 ads = $1.50. With details and ad text: $7.50. A weekly "new ads only" monitor that finds 40 new ads costs $0.06 that week.

No start fee. Searches that fail or find nothing, ads already seen in monitoring mode, duplicates and invalid lines are free. Larger Apify plans get the usual volume discount (Silver 10%, Gold and above 20%).

For comparison (Apify Store, checked 3 October 2026): the most-used Transparency Center Actors charge $0.0015-$0.002 per ad; across all of them the range is $0.001 (plus a $0.005 start fee) to $0.012 per ad, and separate ad-detail events cost $0.003-$0.05.

Control your cost

• Max ads per advertiser or domain (default 100) caps every search; big brands have thousands of ads.
• Before it starts, the run logs its worst-case cost (searches x max ads x price) and compares it with your maximum charge per run. When the maximum is reached the run stops cleanly: SUMMARY.status is LIMIT_REACHED and SUMMARY.notProcessed lists the searches that were not finished.
• Every row has chargedEvents; failed rows have charged: false and an error that ends with "(not charged)".

How to use it

1. Enter Advertisers (names, IDs or links) and/or Domains, one per line.
2. Optional: Shown in country (two-letter code such as US, GB, DE), Ad format, Shown in the last N days.
3. Optional: turn on Ad details and/or Read the ad text.
4. Click Start. The Ads (overview) tab shows the ad images with advertiser, format and dates; Ads (all fields) has everything.

Input example

This is the input the form is prefilled with; a run with it takes about a minute and costs only cents:

{
    "advertisers": [
        "Nike, Inc."
    ],
    "domains": [
        "notion.so"
    ],
    "region": "US",
    "maxAdsPerSearch": 20
}

Output example

Real rows from 3 October 2026 (shortened). A text ad found by domain, with details and ad text:

{
    "input": "zapier.com",
    "searchType": "domain",
    "region": "US",
    "advertiserId": "AR07656268315995668481",
    "advertiserName": "Zapier, Inc",
    "creativeId": "CR05925856452345331713",
    "format": "text",
    "firstShown": "2025-04-25T01:23:10.000Z",
    "lastShown": "2026-10-03T04:56:29.000Z",
    "daysShown": 468,
    "targetDomain": "zapier.com",
    "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/16983613173943704328",
    "adUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR07656268315995668481/creative/CR05925856452345331713?region=US",
    "variationCount": 1,
    "regionsShown": [
        { "country": "DE", "geoId": 2276, "lastShownDate": "2026-10-02" },
        { "country": "US", "geoId": 2840, "lastShownDate": "2026-10-02" },
        { "country": "GB", "geoId": 2826, "lastShownDate": "2026-10-02" }
    ],
    "countriesShown": ["DE", "IL", "CA", "US", "AU", "IT", "MX", "GB"],
    "chargedEvents": ["ad", "ad-details"],
    "charged": true
}

The adText of a HubSpot search ad from the same day (run with "Read the ad text"):

{
    "advertiserName": "Hubspot, Inc.",
    "format": "text",
    "adText": {
        "headline": "See Your Score in Minutes - More Than an AI Search Score",
        "description": "See where competitors beat you in AI search and what to do. Try it free for 28 days.",
        "displayUrl": "www.hubspot.com",
        "callToAction": "Try it Free for 28 Days Get Your Free AEO Score",
        "text": "See Your Score in Minutes - More Than an AI Search Score See where competitors beat you in AI search and what to do. Try it free for 28 days. Try it Free for 28 Days Get Your Free AEO Score"
    },
    "adTextSource": "image-ocr",
    "chargedEvents": ["ad", "ad-text"]
}

A monday.com search ad without an archived image, read exactly from Google's ad preview data (17 October 2026):

{
    "format": "text",
    "imageUrl": null,
    "adText": {
        "headline": "monday CRM",
        "description": "Get started with monday CRM to manage, automate, and centralize the entire sales cycle.",
        "displayUrl": "www.monday.com/",
        "callToAction": "",
        "text": "monday CRM | Get started with monday CRM to manage, automate, and centralize the entire sales cycle. | www.monday.com/"
    },
    "adTextSource": "preview",
    "chargedEvents": ["ad", "ad-text"]
}

Video ads have a previewUrl (the Transparency Center's player script) instead of an image. The run SUMMARY lists, per search, the advertisers used (with Google's ad-count range) and Google's total number of matching ads (totalAdsMin-totalAdsMax).

Advertiser names

A name is matched against Google's advertiser suggestions. Most ads (default) uses the matching advertiser with the most ads, so "Nike" becomes Nike, Inc. (9,000-10,000 ads) rather than a small advertiser called "Nike". All matches uses every advertiser whose name contains your text (up to 10), useful for brands with one advertiser account per country. For an exact advertiser, paste its ID or Transparency Center link.

Use it from code

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/tidytools~ads-transparency/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domains":["canva.com"],"region":"US","maxAdsPerSearch":50}'

With AI agents (MCP): connect Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com?tools=tidytools/ads-transparency) to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, for example, "What Google ads is Zapier running in Germany this month?". Minimal input: {"advertisers": ["Zapier"]}. Searches that fail or find nothing are not charged and carry an errorType.

Limitations

• The Transparency Center shows ads of verified advertisers from about 2018 on; it is not a full archive of every ad ever shown. Political-ads details (spend, impressions) are a separate Google report and are not included.
• Ad counts from Google are ranges ("7,000-8,000"). Results come newest first; the Actor does not sort them differently.
• "Read the ad text" first copies the text from Google's ad preview data (exact, adTextSource: "preview"; keyword-insertion templates such as {KeyWord:Nike Shoes} are kept as Google stores them). Most text ads only have an archived picture, which is read with an AI model (adTextSource: "image-ocr"); very small or stylized text can be misread. Shopping product ads without a picture get no text, and video ads are not transcribed (both not charged).
• The data comes from a Google web page without a public API contract. If Google changes it, results can stop until the Actor is updated; failures are not charged.

Responsible use

• The output is about ads: advertiser, creative, dates, countries. The Actor does not look up people, contact details or profiles.
• Verified advertisers can be individuals (sole traders, consultants) whose legal name Google shows. Use such names only for advertising research, and follow the privacy law that applies to you (for example GDPR in the EU).
• Ad creatives belong to their owners. The Actor returns links to Google's archived copies; do not republish creatives as your own.

FAQ

Does the Actor collect usage data? The Actor sends one anonymous usage counter per run (input type, item count range, outcome) to improve the tool; no URLs, content or account data.

Is this allowed? The Transparency Center is a public page that Google built so anyone can see who advertises. This Actor reads it at a gentle pace with an honest user agent and no login. You are responsible for how you use the results; Google's terms of service apply to Google's sites.

Why do some searches return fewer ads than Google's total? The Max ads per advertiser or domain limit (default 100). Raise it to get more.

Do I pay for an advertiser that has no ads? No. It shows up as a row with errorType: "no_results" and charged: false. An unknown advertiser name or ID gives errorType: "not_found", also free.

What happens if my input is wrong (empty lists, an unknown country code or ad format, a date that does not exist such as 2026-02-31, a number field with text, a line that is not a domain)? The run does not fail: it writes a row with errorType: "invalid_input", charged: false and the reason, ends normally and costs nothing. A bad line (a link that is not a Transparency Center advertiser, text that is not a domain) is reported on its own row and the valid lines in the same run are still searched; a bad setting (country, format, dates, numbers, yes/no switches) stops the run before anything is searched, so nothing is silently replaced by a default. API callers may send numbers and true/false as text.

What if the same advertiser is entered twice (for example "Nike" and "nike inc")? Each ad is returned and charged once per run; repeats are counted in SUMMARY.duplicateAdsMerged / duplicateInputsMerged, and a later spelling that only finds ads already returned gets its own free row (errorType: "duplicate_input", duplicateOf names the first input).

Why does a domain search show other advertisers' names? A domain search returns every ad that points to that domain from every advertiser, including resellers and affiliates, not only the company that owns the domain. Use the advertiser search for one company's own ads.

Why does a second "new ads only" run return nothing? Ads returned before under the same monitor name are skipped and are free; an empty dataset means no new ads.

Support

Open an issue in the Issues tab with the input and the run link. Issues are checked regularly.