--- title: Research your competitors' advertising description: See the ads your competitors are running on Meta, Google, and LinkedIn, find the ones they've kept running longest, and read the offers, angles, and landing pages behind them before you spend on your own campaign. slug: /use-cases/competitor-ad-research page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I analyze my competitors' ads with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent analyze my competitors' ads? - How do I see what ads my competitors are running with AI? - AI agent that analyzes competitor ad creative, landing pages, and run dates - How to do competitor ad research with AI - Can AI tell me which of my competitors' ads have been running longest? - How does an AI marketing agent find patterns in competitor ad creative? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-10-12' date_modified: '2026-10-12' related_integrations: - /integrations/meta-ads.md - /integrations/google-ads.md - /integrations/linkedin-ads.md --- # Research your competitors' advertising ## Key Takeaways - Your competitors' ads are public. Meta, Google, and LinkedIn each publish a library of the ads advertisers run, and AI can pull those ads, read them, and find the patterns much faster than you can scroll through them. - An ad library shows what a company ran and for how long. It never shows spend, clicks, or conversions, so the ads a competitor has kept running longest are the strongest evidence of what it believes is working. - Kite pulls a competitor's ads from its website address, ranks the live ones by how long they've run, groups them by the promise they make, quotes every offer word for word, and reads the landing pages behind the longest-running ads. - Kite turns that research into your first campaign's angles, ad copy, creative, and landing page, and your team launches the campaign in the ad platform. - Kite saves each round of research, so a later check shows which ads a competitor added, which it stopped, and which have kept running. ## Why competitor ad research matters before you spend When you're about to run paid campaigns for the first time, the most useful evidence you can find is already public. Your competitors have spent real money testing headlines, offers, images, and landing pages. The ads they keep paying for tell you which messages they believe are working, and the ads they quietly stop tell you something too. You can see most of this for free. Meta's Ad Library, Google's Ads Transparency Center, and LinkedIn's Ad Library each show the ads an advertiser is running. The hard part is the work that comes after the search. You have to find the right advertiser, open dozens of ads one at a time, note when each started, sort them into themes, copy down the offers, and click through to every landing page. Then you have to do it again for the next competitor, and again next month to see what changed. That's work an AI agent does well, because it's repetitive, it depends on careful reading, and it pays off when the results are kept and compared over time. Kite is an AI marketer in your Slack. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it researches your competitors' ads and turns what it finds into a campaign you can start from evidence. ## How Kite analyzes your competitors' ads Kite starts with the competitors it already knows about. During onboarding, it researches your company and your market and records your competitors in your team's wiki, so you can ask about "our competitors' ads" without listing them. You can also name any company yourself. For each competitor, Kite looks up the advertiser from its website address and pulls its ads from the libraries that matter for your question. It ranks the live ads by how long they've been running, groups them by the promise each one makes, and quotes every offer exactly as the ad states it. Then it opens the landing pages behind the longest-running ads to see how the competitor finishes the sale. Kite brings all of this back to Slack with the evidence attached, including a link to every ad in its public library. It saves a dated snapshot of each competitor's ads in your wiki. When you're ready, it uses the research to plan your own campaign's angles and write the copy and creative. ### Find the right advertiser and pull its ads Kite pulls a competitor's ads by its website address rather than its name, which makes sure it gets the right company's ads. Many brands share similar names, and an ad library search by name can easily return the wrong advertiser. When you tell Kite to look at "acme.com", it resolves that domain to the advertiser behind it before it pulls anything. Kite then pulls the ads from each library your question needs. Each library returns a different amount of detail: - **Meta** gives the fullest record. Kite gets the headline, the body copy, the call to action, the image or video, the landing page, the date the ad started, and whether it's still running. These ads run across Facebook and Instagram. - **Google** shows each ad's format, its creative, and the date it started running, which makes it useful for seeing how long a competitor has backed a search or display ad. - **LinkedIn** shows the headline, the copy, the image, and the landing page. It doesn't report run dates, so LinkedIn ads can show what a competitor says but not how long it has said it. When you don't have a list of competitors yet, Kite can search Meta's ad library by keyword instead. A search for a phrase your buyers use, such as "payroll for small business", shows which advertisers are running ads around it. Kite treats those results as a sample of who matched that phrase, not a full map of your market, and tells you so. Sometimes a pull comes back empty. That doesn't mean the competitor isn't advertising. The library may not have collected the brand yet, or the company may advertise somewhere the library doesn't reach. Kite reports an empty pull as inconclusive and explains the likely reason. ### Rank the ads by how long they've been running The length of time an ad has been running is the closest thing an ad library offers to a performance signal. Libraries don't report spend, impressions, clicks, or conversions. But a company that keeps paying for the same ad for four months is telling you it believes that ad is working, while an ad that ran for a week and stopped probably wasn't. Kite ranks a competitor's live ads by how many days each one has been running and puts the longest-running ones at the top, with their start dates. If a competitor has one video ad that has run since spring and a dozen image ads that each lasted a few weeks, you can see that difference right away. When you want the competitor's history, Kite pulls its ended ads along with the live ones, so you can also see what it tried and dropped. Kite describes these ads by what the library shows. It will say an ad "has run 140 days". It won't claim an ad "converts" or "performs well", because no ad library can show that. ### Group the ads by the promise they make Kite reads each ad's headline and copy and sorts the ads by the promise they make to the buyer. Common groups include price, proof, speed, risk avoided, a specific outcome, or a named feature. Kite names each group in the competitor's own words and counts how many ads and which formats fall into it. This is where patterns across a market become visible. You might find that three competitors all lead with "set up in five minutes" while none of them talks about what happens after month one. That gap is often the most valuable thing the research turns up, because it's an angle your first campaign can own. Kite also pulls every number and offer the competitors advertise, quoted exactly as written. That includes discounts, trial lengths, guarantees, and claims like "2x faster". Keeping the exact wording matters, because a rounded or paraphrased figure becomes a claim the competitor never made. It also shows you the offers your own campaign has to match or beat. ### Read the landing pages behind the best ads An ad is only half of an offer, and the page it sends people to is the other half. Kite opens the landing pages behind a competitor's longest-running live ads and records what each one is: a homepage, a product page, a dedicated landing page, a lead form, or an app store listing. It notes the page's headline, its offer, its main call to action, and whether the page keeps the promise the ad made. Kite also checks each landing domain's mobile page speed. A competitor whose ads promise a fast setup but land on a slow, crowded page is leaving room for a cleaner experience. When several ads point to the same page, Kite treats them as one destination, so you can see which pages a competitor actually relies on. ### Turn the research into your first campaign Kite uses the research to plan your campaign, not just to describe your competitors. It compares the angles and offers in their ads with your positioning, which Kite already has in your wiki. From there, it recommends the angles your campaign should test, flags the claims and trademarks that belong to a competitor and should stay out of your ads, and points out the angles nobody in your market is using. From that plan, Kite writes ad copy for Google search ads and for Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X, with every line checked against the platform's character limits. Its design specialist produces the images, and Kite can also make video ads. When your campaign needs its own landing page, Kite can build it on a website it hosts for you. The copy and creative arrive as a batch for your team to review, and your team launches the campaign and sets its budget in the ad platform. ### Check what changed since the last look Competitors change their ads all the time, and a single snapshot only tells you about one moment. Every time Kite pulls a competitor's ads, it saves a dated record in your wiki of each ad, its start date, and whether it was live. The next time it checks, it compares the new pull with that record. It then reports the new ads, the ads that stopped running, and the long-running ads that have passed another milestone. You can ask Kite to run this check on a schedule, such as every Monday morning, and post the changes in a Slack channel. A competitor that suddenly launches a batch of new ads around a pricing change is something you want to hear about the same week it happens. ## What you get - **An ad record for each competitor.** Every ad Kite pulled, with its platform, format, start date, live status, copy, call to action, landing page, and a link to the ad in its public library. - **A ranked list of long-running ads.** The live ads each competitor has kept running longest, with their start dates, so you can see what it keeps paying for. - **The angles and offers in your market.** Ads grouped by the promise they make, with every offer and numeric claim quoted exactly, plus the angles no competitor is using. - **A landing page teardown.** The pages behind the longest-running ads, with the headline, offer, call to action, and mobile speed of each. - **Your campaign plan and creative.** Recommended angles, ad copy checked against each platform's limits, images or video, and a landing page if you need one, ready for your team to review and launch. - **A record you can compare later.** A dated snapshot in your wiki that the next check compares against, so you see what changed instead of starting over. If you want to browse the ads yourself, Kite can also publish them as a gallery page, with each ad's creative, angle, format, and run dates in one place. ## How to get started Add Kite to Slack, then ask it a plain question about your competitors' ads. You might ask, "What ads are our top three competitors running on Meta, and which have been running longest?" or "We're launching on LinkedIn next month. What are competitors in our space saying in their ads?" Kite uses the competitors in your wiki or the ones you name, tells you which advertisers and libraries it's going to check, and brings the research back in the thread. You don't need to connect anything to start. Kite's ad research is built in, so it works without an account of your own on any ad platform. When you're ready, ask Kite to turn the research into your first campaign. It proposes the angles, writes the copy, and makes the creative for you to review. If you want the research to keep running, ask Kite to check your competitors' ads every week and post what changed. ## Integrations used to research your competitors' advertising Kite's ad research doesn't depend on any connected account. It reads the public ad libraries through its own built-in ad intelligence, so you can research competitors before you've spent anything on ads yourself. ### Compare competitors' ads with your own results Once your campaigns are running, connecting your ad accounts lets Kite put your competitors' ads next to your own performance. Kite reads the results from these accounts. Your team launches Meta and Google campaigns and sets their budgets in those platforms, and with LinkedIn Ads connected, Kite can also build a campaign as a draft that a team owner or admin launches from Kite. - [Meta Ads + Kite](/integrations/meta-ads.md): Read the performance of your own Facebook and Instagram ads, so Kite can see which of your angles earn results and which competitor angles are worth testing next. - [Google Ads + Kite](/integrations/google-ads.md): Read your campaign, ad group, and ad results, so Kite can compare your search ads with the ones competitors have kept running longest. - [LinkedIn Ads + Kite](/integrations/linkedin-ads.md): Read your LinkedIn campaign results alongside the copy and landing pages competitors use on LinkedIn. ## Common questions ### Can I research competitors' ads for free? Yes. Meta's Ad Library, Google's Ads Transparency Center, and LinkedIn's Ad Library are free to search, and TikTok publishes a library of top ads in its Creative Center. They're the same public sources an AI agent reads. What they don't do is the analysis. You'd still have to rank the ads by how long they've run, group them by angle, record the offers, read the landing pages, and keep notes so you can spot changes later. Kite does that work and saves the results for the next time you check. ### Can Kite tell me how much my competitors spend on ads? No. Ad libraries don't publish spend, impressions, clicks, or conversions for commercial ads, so Kite doesn't estimate them from library data. What Kite can show you is how many ads a competitor is running, on which platforms, in which formats, and how long each one has been live. Those are the signals a library actually contains. ### What if a competitor doesn't seem to be running any ads? An empty result doesn't prove a company isn't advertising. The library may not have collected the brand yet, the company may run ads under a different page or brand name, or it may advertise on a platform the library doesn't cover. Kite marks an empty pull as inconclusive, tells you the most likely cause, and, for Meta, makes one more attempt to find the right advertiser before it reports back. ### Does Kite launch or manage the campaign after the research? Kite doesn't launch campaigns on its own. Kite plans the campaign and produces the copy, images, video, and landing page, and your team launches the campaign and sets its budget in the ad platform. With LinkedIn Ads connected, Kite can build the campaign as a draft in your ad account, with its targeting and budget, and a team owner or admin launches it from Kite. Once it's running, connecting your ad account lets Kite read the results and recommend what to change next. ### Can Kite research competitors' ads on TikTok? Partly. Kite's ecommerce research can search TikTok ads and public TikTok videos in a category, which is most useful for Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. The detailed competitor ad record described on this page, with copy, landing pages, and run dates for each ad, comes from Meta, Google, and LinkedIn.