How to write ads that answer your competitors' ads

You write ads that stand out by finding what your competitors' ads all say, then saying something they don't. Most markets settle into a few familiar promises. Every project tool is "the easiest way to manage work," and every accounting product "saves you hours." When your ad makes the same promise in slightly different words, a buyer scrolling past sees one more version of an ad they've already ignored.

The job has three parts. First, you collect your competitors' current ads. Second, you read them for the angles they lean on, the offers they make, and the pages they send people to. Third, you write your own ads around the openings that reading reveals. A good result is a small set of ads, each built on a clearly different reason to click, that a buyer could not mistake for a competitor's.

The free ad libraries make the first part possible. The Meta Ad Library shows the active ads a company runs on Facebook and Instagram, with the date each one started running. The Google Ads Transparency Center shows a company's search, display, and YouTube ads, with the dates they were shown. The LinkedIn Ad Library shows ads that ran on LinkedIn in the past year. You can search each one by company name, take screenshots, and build your own swipe file, which is a collection of ads you save for reference.

The libraries stop at showing you the ads. For most commercial ads, they don't report spend, impressions, clicks, or conversions, so you can't see which ads work. They also leave the reading and the writing to you. That reading takes time across several competitors and three libraries, and it's easy to finish with a pile of screenshots and no clear idea of what to say.

Kite does the reading and the writing for you. It pulls your competitors' ads, works out which promises they share and which ones nobody makes, and writes your ads from what your own customers say.

Start by asking Kite for ads that answer your competitors. You can name the competitors and the platform:

"Pull the Meta ads our three main competitors are running and write us a set of ads that answers them."

Or you can let Kite choose:

"Our Google search ads look like everyone else's. Find out what competitors are running and write new ones."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. When you sign up, Kite researches your company, including your positioning, your customers, and your competitors, so it already knows whose ads to pull and what your product can honestly promise. If you name competitors, Kite uses yours. If you don't, it uses the ones its research recorded and tells you which it chose.

You don't need an ad library account, because Kite reads the ad libraries through its own built-in ad research. The one thing Kite needs from you is evidence of what your customers say, such as reviews, testimonials, notes from sales calls, or comments on your ads. Kite looks for it in its research on your company first, and if it can't find any, it asks you for it before writing a line. If you want Kite to learn from how your current ads perform, connect your ad account, such as Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Google Ads.

Kite pulls the ads each competitor is running now, from the ad library that fits the question. It looks up each competitor's ads from its website address, after first confirming which company that address belongs to. A guessed identity can return another brand's ads with nothing to show the mistake, so this check comes before anything else. Meta is the default, because most companies run their feed ads there. Kite adds Google when you ask about search ads and LinkedIn when you ask about LinkedIn ads.

A routine pull stops at about 20 live ads for each competitor, and Kite takes up to ten competitors in one job. For each ad, it records the platform, the format, the headline and main text word for word, the call to action, the landing page, a link to the creative, the date the ad started, and the ad's link in the library.

When you want a picture of a whole market rather than named competitors, Kite searches the Meta Ad Library by the words your buyers use, such as a product term, a problem, or an offer. Those results are a sample of whoever matched the phrase, and Kite reports them that way.

Kite reads the ads for three things: which ones have lasted, which promises they make, and what they offer. Because the libraries show no performance figures, the length of time an ad has run is the best evidence available. A competitor that keeps paying for an ad for months has decided it's worth keeping. Kite ranks each competitor's live ads by how long they've run and reports the leaders with their dates. It describes an ad as one that "has run 140 days," never as one that "performs well," because the library can't show that.

Next, Kite groups the ads by the promise each one makes to the buyer, such as a lower price, proof from customers, speed, a risk avoided, a result, or a named feature. It names each group in the competitor's own words and counts how many ads fall into it. It also quotes every number and offer exactly as the ad states it, such as a trial length, a discount, a guarantee, or "no credit card." A rounded figure would turn into a claim the competitor never made.

Finally, Kite reads the landing pages behind the longest-running ads. It records what kind of page each one is, its headline, its offer, its main button, and whether the page keeps the promise the ad made. The ad is only half of what a competitor sells. The page it lands on is the other half.

Kite turns that reading into a brief for your ads, so the writing starts from evidence. The brief contains the following:

• The competitors' longest-running ads and their leading angles, with the creatives and landing pages
• The offers you would have to beat
• The angles no competitor runs
• The claims and trademarks that belong to a competitor and stay off limits

You can also ask Kite to check a competitor's ad promises against what its customers say. Kite gathers reviews and community discussion of the competitor's product and sets each claim beside them. It treats a claim as contradicted only when two customers on different sites or from different authors say so, because one angry post is an anecdote. When a contradicted claim could support comparative advertising, Kite marks it for your team to review before you use it.

Kite chooses three to five angles before it writes any lines, and each angle gives a buyer a different reason to click. It draws each one from a different insight: a problem your customers describe, a result they got, proof, a comparison, who the product is built for, an objection answered, or a view that runs against the market. The gaps in the brief shape which angles Kite picks, so the batch leads with the promises your competitors leave open. An offer or deadline angle appears only when you have a real, dated offer.

Every line traces to a source. Kite uses your customers' own words where they fit, and a number, customer count, or quote appears only when a source states it. It keeps the source's qualifiers too, so "about ten minutes" never becomes "ten minutes." The competitor research can ground a comparison angle, but the competitors' claims and trademarks stay theirs.

Kite writes each platform's fields the way that platform shows them. It can write for Google search ads and for Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X.

• Google search ads. Google mixes any three headlines with two descriptions in any order, so each headline has to make sense on its own and beside any other. Each ad gets between 3 and 15 headlines of up to 30 characters, including one with your target keyword, one with a benefit, and one with a call to action, plus 2 to 4 descriptions of up to 90 characters that add proof or answer an objection.
• Meta ads. Meta tests several text options in one ad, so Kite writes two to five main texts that make the same argument from different openings, plus two headlines that do different jobs. It keeps the hook in the first sentence, because the feed cuts off longer text. Kite also reminds you that Meta's own text enhancements can rewrite your options, so a clean test needs them turned off.
• LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn cuts off the introductory text after 150 characters and the headline after 70, so the hook goes first and the headline states the value or the action.
• TikTok and X. TikTok ad text can't carry links, mentions, or hashtags. On X, the post itself is the ad.

Kite writes every field in sentence case with straight quotes. Then it runs a check that counts each line's characters the way the platforms count them. The check catches any line over its limit, any duplicate line within an ad, any Google ad with too few or too many headlines, and any line missing its source. Kite fixes every problem and runs the check again until the batch is clean.

Kite delivers the batch for you to review and launch, not as live ads. It posts the angles, the insight behind each one, and every line of copy where you asked, along with the result of the character check and any limit that still needs confirming in the platform. The same rows come as a spreadsheet file with a column for the ad, platform, field, angle, text, character count, limit, and source.

You choose the lines you like, add the final link, and launch them in the ad platform. If you'd rather upload in bulk, Kite can save a copy in the platform's import layout once you give it the campaign and ad group names and the final link. From there, Kite can create the images for the ads and build a matching landing page on a site it hosts, so the page keeps the ad's promise.

When your ad account is connected, Kite reads how each ad performed over a period you choose. It keeps the winning angles with fresh wording, retires the losing ones, and tests one or two new ones. It records each round, including which angles won and which are now being tested, so the next batch builds on it. To keep watching your competitors, ask Kite to pull their ads on a schedule, and it reports which new ads started and which long-runners passed another milestone since the last look.

When Kite finishes, you have a brief on your competitors' ads and a batch of your own ads written to answer them.