How do I check whether my competitor's ad claims match what their customers say?
You check a competitor's ad claims by setting their ads and their customer reviews side by side, one claim at a time. Start with the ads they're paying to run right now, because those are the promises they currently stand behind. Write each claim down exactly as the ad says it, such as "set up in five minutes" or "no credit card required." Then search what their customers write about that same topic and decide whether the customers agree, disagree, or never mention it.
The public tools give you each half of the picture. Meta's Ad Library shows the ads any advertiser is running across Facebook and Instagram, with the copy, the creative, and the date each ad started. Google's Ads Transparency Center does the same for search, display, and YouTube ads, and LinkedIn's Ad Library covers LinkedIn. On the customer side, Trustpilot shows a company's overall rating and its individual reviews, G2 and Capterra collect software reviews with sections on what people like and dislike, and Reddit and Hacker News hold looser discussions where people compare products.
None of these tools connects an ad to the reviews that test it. That's the part you do by hand. You read every ad, pull out the claims, decide which reviews speak to each one, and keep track of your sources. It goes slowly, and it's easy to let one vivid complaint stand in for what customers generally say.
A good result is a short list of the competitor's claims, each one paired with real customer evidence and an honest reading. Some claims will hold up, and knowing that is useful too, because it tells you where not to pick a fight. The claims customers contradict are where your positioning, your comparison pages, and your sales conversations have the most room.
Kite does this comparison for you, from pulling the ads to giving each claim its reading.
How to get started
Start by asking Kite to check a competitor's claims in a plain request:
"Check whether our main competitor's ad claims hold up in what their customers actually say."
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Because it researched your market when you signed up, it already knows who your competitors are and keeps them in your team's knowledge base. If you don't name a company, it picks the competitor your research ranks highest and tells you which one it chose and why. You can name a different competitor, add a second one, or ask for a specific ad platform such as LinkedIn.
You don't need an account with any ad library or review site. Kite's ad intelligence source and its research tools are built in. This is research, not publishing, so Kite does the work and reports back without waiting for an approval.
How Kite checks a competitor's ad claims
Which company is actually running the ads?
Kite confirms the competitor's identity in the ad library before it pulls a single ad. It starts from the company's website address and resolves it to that advertiser's record in the library. That step matters because a pull against a guessed name can return another brand's ads with nothing in the results to show the mistake. Kite reports which advertiser it matched and how it matched it.
What is the competitor promising?
Kite pulls the competitor's live ads and writes down every claim and offer word for word. By default it checks Meta, which covers both Facebook and Instagram, and it adds Google or LinkedIn when you ask for them or want to know about search or LinkedIn ads. A routine check covers up to 20 live ads per advertiser.
For each ad, Kite records the platform, the format, the headline and main copy, the call to action, the landing page, the date the ad started, how many days it has run, and a link to the ad in the library. Then it pulls out the claims. Numbers and offer terms stay exactly as the ad states them, such as a trial length, a discount, a guarantee, or a speed claim. A rounded or merged figure would become a claim the competitor never made.
Kite also notes how long each ad has run. An ad that has run for months is one the competitor keeps paying for, which tells you which promises they lean on hardest. Ad libraries don't report spend, clicks, or conversions, so Kite never says an ad performs well. It says only that the ad has run, and for how long.
If the library returns no ads, Kite treats that as inconclusive rather than as proof the competitor doesn't advertise. The library may not have collected the brand yet, or the brand may advertise somewhere the library doesn't reach. Kite tells you which explanation the evidence points to.
What do the competitor's customers say?
Kite gathers customer reviews and community discussions about the same product the ads are selling. From Trustpilot, it collects the company's profile, including its overall rating and total review count, and up to 200 of its most recent reviews. Each review comes with its star rating, title, full text, date, and whether the company replied.
Kite then searches review sites such as G2 and Capterra, and community sites such as Reddit, for posts about the product. It reads Hacker News threads and comments directly, along with who wrote each one. It searches for the topics the ads raise, so a claim about setup time leads to reviews about onboarding, and a claim about support leads to reviews about response times. Every piece of evidence keeps its source link.
When a source can't be reached, Kite says so rather than treating the gap as silence. A Trustpilot profile with no reviews tells you nothing about what customers say on G2.
Does each claim hold up?
Kite gives every claim one of three readings, based on what customers say about that specific promise:
- Supported means customers describe the same benefit the ad promises, in their own words.
- Contradicted means at least two customers on different sites, or two different authors, describe the opposite of the claim.
- Not discussed means customers don't talk about the claim either way.
The rule for "contradicted" is strict because reviews skew negative. Unhappy customers write more often than satisfied ones, and a single angry post is an anecdote, not a pattern. Requiring two independent sources keeps one bad experience from turning into a finding you'd later build a campaign on.
"Not discussed" is a reading of its own, not a failure. A claim nobody mentions is often one customers don't care about, which can be as useful to know as a claim they dispute. Kite also keeps facts and inferences apart, so you can see which parts of a reading come straight from a review and which parts are Kite's interpretation.
What should your team do with a contradicted claim?
Kite flags any contradicted claim your team might use in its own comparative advertising as needing your team's review before use. A claim about a competitor in your ads has to hold up on its own evidence, so a person on your team decides whether the reviews are strong enough to stand behind.
From there, Kite can turn the findings into work. It can write a comparison page that addresses the gap, draft ad copy for Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, or X that speaks to the weakness customers describe, or prepare a creative brief for a campaign. It can also put the check on a schedule, such as once a month, so you see when the competitor changes its ads or when customer sentiment shifts.
What Kite reports back
Kite posts the results in the conversation where you asked, in the Kite web app or in Slack. The summary says which advertiser it checked, which platforms it pulled, how many ads came back, and which review sources it reached. If the table is long, Kite can publish it as a report page you can share. It also saves a dated snapshot of the competitor's ads in your knowledge base, so the next check can show what changed instead of starting over.
What the finished work contains
When Kite finishes, you have a claim-by-claim reading of the competitor's ads, with every conclusion traceable to an ad and to the customers behind it.
The claims table
Each row holds one claim quoted word for word, the ad it came from with its library link, what customers say with links to each source, and the reading of supported, contradicted, or not discussed.
The ad record
Each ad has its platform, format, copy, call to action, landing page, start date, days running, and library link.
Coverage notes
The summary states which ad platforms and review sources Kite checked, which returned nothing, and where the results are a sample rather than a full count.
Review flags
Every contradicted claim your team might use in its own ads is marked for your team's review.
The knowledge base snapshot
A dated record of the competitor's ads stays in your knowledge base for later checks and for any work that builds on this one.
Common questions
Can I use a competitor's bad reviews in my own ads?
You can make truthful comparative claims, but each claim about a competitor needs evidence strong enough to defend, and a handful of reviews is rarely enough on its own. That's why Kite marks every contradicted claim for your team's review before it goes near your advertising. Many teams use these findings in positioning, sales conversations, and comparison pages, where they can explain the context, rather than in a short ad line.
Can I see a competitor's old ads, or only the ones running now?
Meta's Ad Library shows ads that are running now for most advertisers, and keeps past ads only for political and social-issue ads, for seven years, and for ads shown in the European Union or the United Kingdom, for a year after they last ran. Google's and LinkedIn's libraries show some past ads. For this check, Kite starts with live ads, because those are the claims the competitor is standing behind today. When you want to track changes over time, Kite compares each new pull with the snapshot it saved last time.
What if the competitor has very few reviews?
When customers say little, Kite marks most claims as not discussed and tells you which sources it checked. That's still a finding, because it means the competitor's promises haven't been tested in public yet. In that case, Kite can look for indirect evidence, such as "switched from" and "alternatives" threads, where buyers explain why they left a product.