How to see what LinkedIn ads a competitor is running

The way to see a competitor's LinkedIn ads is the LinkedIn Ad Library, a free, public archive of ads that have run on LinkedIn in the past year. Go to linkedin.com/ad-library and type the competitor's company name in the advertiser search, or type a phrase in the keyword search to find ads that use it. You can narrow the results by country and by date range, such as the last 30 days, which is the quickest way to see what a competitor is running now rather than what it ran last spring.

Each result shows the ad as people saw it in their feed: the advertiser, the introductory text above the ad, the image or video, and the headline. Click an ad to open its details page, which names the company that paid for it and the ad's format, such as a single image ad, a video ad, a carousel, or a document ad. For ads shown in the European Union, the details page adds more, including how many impressions the ad received and the targeting the advertiser chose.

What the library doesn't show is how the ads perform. There's no spend, no clicks, and no conversions, and outside the EU there's no targeting either. That changes what's worth reading. On LinkedIn, a competitor's ads are the clearest public statement of who it's trying to sell to and what it wants them to do. The job titles and problems the copy names tell you the buyer. The offer tells you where in the sale the ad sits: a guide or a webinar is meant to collect names, while a demo or a free trial is aimed at people ready to buy. Reading a competitor's LinkedIn ads well means noticing which promises keep coming back, quoting the offers exactly, and clicking through to see where each ad sends people.

That's slow work for one competitor, and most B2B companies watch several. Kite does the pulling and the reading for you and saves what it found so the next check has something to compare against.

Start by asking Kite, in the Kite web app or in Slack, which competitors' LinkedIn ads you want to see:

"Show me the LinkedIn ads our three main competitors are running, and tell me who they're aimed at and what they're offering."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. It researched your company and market when you signed up, so it already knows who your competitors are. You can say "our main competitors" and Kite will name the ones it chose and why, or you can give it a list of competitor websites or name a single company.

Mention LinkedIn in your request. When nobody names a platform, Kite looks at Meta's ads first, because that's where most advertisers run, and it adds LinkedIn when you ask for it.

You don't need a LinkedIn account, a LinkedIn Ads account, or a subscription to an ad research tool. Kite has its own ad intelligence source built in, and it reaches LinkedIn's ad library through that. Looking at ads is research, not publishing, so Kite does the work and reports back in the same conversation.

Kite looks up a competitor's LinkedIn ads from the company's website address, so it starts by confirming which company and which domain it means. If you named a company without a website, Kite finds the domain first and tells you which company it settled on. Pulling ads against a guessed identity returns another company's ads with nothing to show the mistake, which is why this step comes first.

When the lookup comes back with no ads, Kite reports the result as inconclusive rather than saying the competitor doesn't advertise on LinkedIn. An empty result can mean the library hasn't matched that website to the company's LinkedIn advertiser account, or that the company advertises somewhere else. Kite says which explanation the evidence supports, and it can check the competitor's Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads when you ask.

Kite pulls a routine sample of about twenty ads per competitor, which is usually enough to see the pattern. When you ask for a full inventory, it pulls more and says why. It can look at up to ten competitors side by side in one request, and each one is a separate lookup, so a competitor that comes back empty doesn't affect the others.

For each ad, Kite records:

• The format, such as a single image, video, carousel, or document ad
• The headline and the introductory text, quoted word for word
• The landing page the ad links to
• The image, when LinkedIn returns one
• The ad's own details page in the LinkedIn Ad Library

When LinkedIn doesn't return a detail, Kite marks it as not returned instead of filling the gap. Kite's LinkedIn results don't carry an ad's run dates or whether it's still running, so Kite says so in the record rather than presenting the ads as all live. The library link is the reference worth keeping, because it opens the ad exactly as LinkedIn shows it, and image links can expire.

Kite groups the ads by the promise each one makes to the buyer, because that's where a LinkedIn ad shows its strategy. A promise might be a lower cost, a faster result, a customer story, a risk avoided, or a specific feature. Kite names each group in the competitor's own words and says how many ads fall in it and which formats they use. A promise that appears in only one ad is reported as a single ad, not a strategy.

Kite also quotes every number and offer exactly as the ad states it, such as a free trial length, a "book a demo" call, a report download, or a claim like "cut reporting time in half." Rounding those into "strong offers" would turn them into claims the competitor never made, and you'd lose the detail you need to answer them. When the copy names a role or a team, such as heads of finance or RevOps teams, that wording appears in the quotes, so you can see who each group of ads is written for.

Every conclusion Kite draws here is labelled as its inference and points to the ads it rests on. Because the library shows that an ad ran and not how it did, Kite never says an ad performs well or converts.

Kite reads the page behind the lead ad of each promise group, because an ad is only half of an offer and the page it leads to is the other half. For each page, it records what kind of page it is, such as a homepage, a product page, a dedicated landing page, or a signup form. It also records the headline, the offer, the main call to action, and whether the page keeps the promise the ad made.

Kite removes tracking codes from the links before comparing them, so ten ads that all point at one page show up as one page. Some LinkedIn ads collect details with a form inside LinkedIn instead of sending people to a website. Kite records those as LinkedIn forms and doesn't try to read them, since there's no outside page to open.

Kite compares a competitor's LinkedIn ads with your own when you ask, by pulling your company's ads the same way and reading your positioning from your knowledge base. It reports the promises and offers your competitors run that your ads don't, and the ones only you run. If your own pull comes back empty, Kite says so and gives you the competitor reading on its own.

Kite posts its findings in the conversation where you asked. For each competitor, it states which company and website it used, how many ads it pulled, and whether those ads are the full set or a sample. The ads come as a table you can scan, followed by Kite's reading of the promises, offers, and landing pages.

Kite also saves a dated snapshot of each competitor's ads to your knowledge base. The snapshot records each ad's library ID and the promise it was grouped under. The next time anyone asks about that competitor, Kite starts from that record instead of from nothing.

From there, Kite can turn the findings into your own campaign. It can write a creative brief that answers the competitor's strongest promises, and it can write LinkedIn ad copy checked against LinkedIn's limits, which cut off introductory text after about 150 characters and headlines after about 70. If you connect your LinkedIn Ads account, Kite can prepare the campaign and its image ads as drafts, look up targeting options, and suggest bids. A team owner or admin launches the draft from Kite after confirming its budget.

When Kite finishes, you have a clear record of what each competitor is saying in its LinkedIn ads and what that suggests, with every claim tied to an ad you can open in the LinkedIn Ad Library.