Google Ads Transparency Pro API

Search the Google Ads Transparency Center by brand, verified advertiser ID/URL, or advertised domain and return structured ad creatives ready for competitor research, ad intelligence, monitoring, and data pipelines.

The Actor uses Google's public Transparency Center RPC endpoints directly. It does not require a browser for the normal extraction path.

Why this Actor?

Google Ads Transparency can be difficult to automate reliably: brand names may resolve to several legal advertisers, search results are paginated, country filters use numeric region identifiers, creative details live behind a second lookup call, and external changes can produce empty or confusing outputs.

This Actor is designed around predictable, auditable behavior:

• Brand / legal advertiser search with scored resolution
• Direct advertiser IDs and Transparency Center URLs
• Advertised-domain search when the legal advertiser name is unknown
• Country filtering for virtually all ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 countries
• Automatic pagination instead of returning only the first page
• Duplicate creative removal
• Image, video, text, and unknown-format filtering
• First/last shown dates and days active
• Advertiser verification/legal-name lookup
• Creative preview/content URLs
• Optional detailed creative enrichment
• Optional date window filtering
• Bounded retries and timeouts
• Optional proxy rotation
• Diagnostic failure rows are not charged
• Stops cleanly at the user's maximum charge limit

Input examples

Search by brand

{
  "queries": ["Nike"],
  "region": "US",
  "maxAdsPerAdvertiser": 100,
  "detailLevel": "basic"
}

Search by advertiser URL

{
  "advertiserUrls": [
    "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16735076323512287233"
  ],
  "region": "US",
  "detailLevel": "detailed"
}

Search by advertised domain

{
  "domains": ["nike.com"],
  "region": "US",
  "maxAdsPerAdvertiser": 50
}

Advertiser resolution

For text queries, the Actor reads Google Ads Transparency suggestions and scores candidates using:

1. normalized exact/partial name match,
2. requested country match,
3. approximate ad-volume signal.

The selected advertiser is then verified with Google's advertiser lookup endpoint. Enable Include advertiser resolution candidates to include the candidate list used for ambiguous brands.

For maximum precision in recurring workflows, supply a known AR... advertiser ID or Transparency Center advertiser URL.

Basic vs detailed mode

Basic returns the core creative row: advertiser, creative ID, format, first/last shown dates, days active, content/preview URL, and Transparency Center URL.

Detailed performs an additional creative lookup. When Google exposes the data, it can add:

• additional creative/content variants,
• region reach information,
• platform breakdowns,
• targeting flags,
• topic/category information.

If a detail lookup fails while the base ad is valid, the Actor returns the base ad with detailAvailable: false and charges it at the basic rate instead of failing or overcharging.

Pricing

• Basic ad: $0.0015 per successful ad row — about $1.50 / 1,000 ads
• Detailed ad: $0.0022 per successfully enriched ad row — about $2.20 / 1,000 ads
• A small Actor-start charge is shown in the Apify pricing panel.

Resolution/search errors are useful diagnostic rows and are not charged as ad results.

The pricing is positioned around the active Google Ads Transparency market rather than artificially undercutting it.

Country support

Input uses normal two-letter ISO codes such as US, IT, GB, DE, FR, CA, AU, JP, or BR.

The Actor derives Google's numeric country identifier from ISO/M49 data, avoiding a short hardcoded country list.

Date and format filters

Use formats to keep only image, video, text, or unknown creatives.

Use dateFrom and dateTo with ISO dates such as 2026-01-01. Filtering is applied to the first/last shown timestamps returned by Google.

Reliability

Requests use bounded timeouts and retry temporary network failures, HTTP 403/408/425/429 responses, and server errors. Direct requests are the default to avoid unnecessary proxy cost.

If Google begins limiting a run, enable Proxy configuration. The Actor can rotate proxy sessions between retry attempts.

Google Ads Transparency uses undocumented public RPC endpoints. They can change without notice, so the Actor uses defensive parsing and emits explicit errors instead of silently returning bad rows.

Output

Successful rows use recordType: "ad" and include a direct Transparency Center URL for the creative.

Resolution and search failures use success: false with a structured errorType and concise error message. They remain in the Dataset for debugging but are not billed as ads.

Responsible use

This Actor reads public advertising-transparency data. Use the output in accordance with applicable privacy, copyright, advertising, and platform rules.

Support

For a reproducible problem, include the run ID, query/advertiser ID, region, and whether a proxy was enabled. Never include API tokens or proxy credentials in an issue.