How to see what Google ads a competitor is running

The direct way to see a competitor's Google ads is the Google Ads Transparency Center at adstransparency.google.com. Google requires advertisers to verify their identity, and it publishes the ads each verified advertiser runs. Type a competitor's name or website into the search box, open their advertiser page, and you'll see their ads across Google Search, YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. You can filter by country, by date range, by platform, and by format, which is text, image, or video. Click any ad to see a preview of it and the date it was last shown.

Two other routes come up often, and both are narrower. Searching Google for your own keywords shows you whichever competitor ads happen to appear for that search, in that place, at that moment. Auction Insights, inside your own Google Ads account, names the advertisers competing in the same auctions as you and how often they outrank you, but it never shows their ads. Third-party tools such as SpyFu and Semrush collect search results over time and estimate which keywords a domain bids on, which is a different question from what the ads say.

What the Transparency Center leaves out matters as much as what it shows. It doesn't publish spend, clicks, impressions in most countries, or the keywords behind a search ad. An ad's presence in the library tells you only that it ran and when.

So a good result isn't a screenshot of one ad. It's a record of everything a competitor is running on Google, sorted so you can see the pattern:

• Which ads are still running, and which have stopped
• Which ads have run for months, because advertisers rarely keep paying for an ad that loses money
• Which formats they rely on, such as text ads on search or video on YouTube
• What changed since the last time you looked

Doing that by hand for five competitors means clicking through hundreds of ads and copying dates into a spreadsheet. Kite does that work for you, and it keeps the record so the next check starts from the last one.

Start by asking Kite, in the Kite web app or in Slack, which competitors you want checked:

"What Google ads are our three main competitors running right now?"

You can also name a single company or ask a wider question:

"Pull everything our biggest competitor has run on Google this year, and tell me which ads they've kept running the longest."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Its research already covers your competitors and their websites, so when you ask about "our main competitors," it knows who you mean and proposes the list. Confirm the list or change it, and Kite starts.

You don't need to connect anything. Ad intelligence is one of Kite's built-in data sources, so it reads the ad libraries through its own connection.

Kite identifies each competitor by its website domain before it pulls a single ad, because a pull against the wrong identity returns another company's ads with nothing to show the mistake. It uses the company's main domain rather than a subdomain or a product page. When a request names a company it doesn't already know, Kite finds the company's website first and tells you which company it resolved, and when a name could mean two companies, it asks which one you meant.

Kite asks Google's ad library for the ads tied to that domain, and it can pull Meta and LinkedIn ads for the same competitor in the same pass when the question calls for them. For each Google ad, it collects the following:

• The advertiser name as Google lists it
• The format, which is text, image, or video
• The date the ad was first shown
• The date it was last shown
• A preview of the ad as Google displays it
• The link to the ad's own page in the Ads Transparency Center

A routine check covers the ads a competitor is running now. When you ask for history or a full inventory, Kite goes further back and says in the result why it did.

An empty result from Google's library doesn't prove that a competitor isn't advertising, and Kite reports it as inconclusive rather than as zero ads. The advertiser may run its ads under a parent company or a different website, or Google may not have published the ads yet. Kite states the likely cause it can support, such as an ad account registered to a parent company's domain, so you know whether to trust the gap or look again under another name.

Kite reads the first and last shown dates on every ad to sort the current campaign from the past ones. An ad last shown this week is running now. An ad last shown three months ago has stopped. An ad that first ran a year ago and was last shown yesterday has survived many rounds of budget decisions, and Kite flags those long runners first, because they're the ads a competitor has chosen to keep paying for.

Kite then reads the set as a whole. It counts the ads in each format and compares Google with the competitor's Meta and LinkedIn ads when you asked for those too. Every statement it draws from the ads is labeled as its reading and cites the ads it rests on. Kite never claims an ad converts or wins, because a library shows only that the ad ran and for how long.

Kite files a dated snapshot of each competitor's ads in your team's knowledge base. The snapshot records the date of the pull, the domain it used, which platforms it covered, and one line per ad with its library ID, platform, start date, and whether it was live. That's what lets a later check report what changed, such as the new video ads a competitor launched this month and the text ads it stopped, instead of starting from nothing.

Kite posts its findings in the conversation where you asked. You get a short summary per competitor, the full list of ads as a table, and a coverage line that says which platforms were pulled, which came back empty, and anything Google's library couldn't answer.

From there, Kite can act on what it found:

• Write your own Google search ads. Kite writes headlines and descriptions for your Google search ads with every line checked against Google's character limits, and it delivers them as a batch for your team to review.
• Plan a counter-campaign. Kite can turn a competitor's long-running angles into a creative brief or a landing page that answers them.
• Check again on a schedule. Ask Kite to repeat the check every week or every month, and each run compares against the last snapshot and reports only what changed.

When Kite finishes, you have a complete, sourced picture of what each competitor is running on Google, and a baseline for every future check.