What the Meta Ad Library shows (and what it doesn't)
The Ad Library lives at facebook.com/ads/library and needs no login to browse. According to Meta's help pages, it lets you search every ad currently running across Meta technologies: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network and Threads. It also keeps three archives of ads that have stopped: ads about social issues, elections or politics for seven years, ads that ran anywhere in the EU for one year, and ads that ran in the UK for one year, counted from July 2025. Meta says an ad appears within 24 hours of its first impression, and edits show up within 24 hours too.
That has a consequence people miss. If a competitor advertises only outside the EU and UK, you can see their ads only while they are live. The day a campaign is paused, it disappears from the Library, and your screenshots and notes are the only history. That is why the workflow below logs what you see instead of trusting that you can look it up again.
- Shown for every active ad: the creative (image, video or carousel cards), primary text, the Page that ran it, start date, platforms, Library ID, and whether several versions exist.
- Added for EU and UK delivery: estimated reach, and the age range, gender and locations the advertiser targeted; for EU ads, the declared beneficiary and payer.
- Added for political and issue ads: spend and impression ranges, the "paid for by" disclaimer, and the age, gender and regional breakdown of who saw it.
- Never shown for ordinary commercial ads: spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, bids, budgets, or audiences built from customer lists and lookalikes.
How to search by advertiser, keyword, country and platform
Every search starts with two choices: a country and an ad category. The country filter means "ads delivered in this country", not "advertisers based in this country", so a US brand selling in Germany appears when you pick Germany. The category is either all ads or ads about issues, elections or politics; stay on all ads for competitor research unless you work in that space.
Then decide whether you are searching for an advertiser or for words. Typing a brand name opens a dropdown of matching Pages; picking the Page, rather than pressing Enter, shows only that advertiser's ads. Pressing Enter runs a keyword search across ad text and returns every ad containing the phrase, from any advertiser.
- Advertiser search, for "what is this competitor running?": select the exact Page. Many brands advertise from several Pages (a regional Page, a founder's Page, a product line), so check the dropdown for all of them.
- Keyword search, for "who else sells this?": search the phrase your customers use, such as "same-day boiler repair", in quotes to keep the words together. This is how you find competitors you did not know about.
- Country: pick the market you sell in. If you also sell into the EU, repeat the search in an EU country; inactive EU ads stay searchable for a year and carry reach data.
- Platform: narrow to Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Audience Network or Threads. An advertiser that runs only on Instagram is telling you something about its audience.
- Media type, language, active status and impressions by date: filter to video when you are researching formats, and use the date filter in the EU to see what ran during a specific period, such as last year's Black Friday.
Reading an ad: start date, versions, platforms, EU reach data
The start date ("Started running on") is the most valuable field, because it is the closest thing to a performance signal Meta publishes for commercial ads. Advertisers switch off ads that lose money. An ad with the same offer and creative running for four months is almost certainly one the advertiser is happy with; an ad that appeared last Tuesday tells you only that they are testing. It is a heuristic, not proof: some ads run by neglect, and a long-running ad may be getting little budget. Judge the pattern across many ads, not one.
When a card says the ad has multiple versions, the advertiser gave Meta several variations of text or creative inside one ad, usually through dynamic or Advantage+ creative options. Open them: they show which headlines and images are being tested against each other. When the Library groups several ads that use the same creative and text, the advertiser is running that creative in more than one ad set, often a sign it is being scaled.
The platform icons show where the ad is eligible to run. An ad listing Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network is almost always on automatic placements; an ad restricted to Instagram was restricted on purpose. The Library ID identifies the ad permanently, so record it; it is also how you find the same ad through the API.
On an EU or UK ad, the ad details add a transparency section: estimated reach for that delivery, a breakdown by country, age and gender, and the targeting the advertiser selected. Reach is an estimate of accounts, not impressions or spend. Still, it is the only public figure that lets you compare the scale of two commercial ads: if one ad reached several hundred thousand accounts and another a few thousand, you know which one has money behind it. Click the advertiser's name too; the Page transparency details can reveal that a "competitor" is really a reseller or a test Page.
Political and issue ads: spend and targeting data
Ads about social issues, elections or politics are the exception to almost every limit above. They stay in the Library for seven years, active or not, and each shows a spend range (a band, not an exact figure), an impressions range, the disclaimer naming who paid, and the age, gender and location distribution of the people reached. Meta also publishes the Ad Library Report, which totals this spend by advertiser and region for supported countries.
Two cautions. The category is broader than elections: in many countries it covers ads about topics such as health, the economy, immigration and the environment, so a commercial brand running an advocacy message can land in it. If you work in energy, healthcare, finance or non-profits, check this category for competitors, because it may be the only place their spend is disclosed. And the EU is now a gap: Meta announced in July 2025 that it would stop allowing political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU from October 2025, in response to the EU's new political advertising regulation, so there are no new EU ads in this category to study.
A competitor-research workflow (what to log, how often)
A log is what turns browsing into research. The goal is to notice changes: a new offer, a new angle, a format shift, a seasonal push. Those only become visible when you compare this week with last week, and outside the EU the Library will not keep last week for you.
Start with five to ten competitors and every Page each advertises from, plus two or three keyword searches for what you sell, to catch new entrants. Do the same pass once a week, on the same day with the same country filter. Weekly is enough for most markets; go to twice a week around big launches and the fourth quarter.
- Library ID, advertiser and Page, so each ad is logged once and can be found again.
- Start date, plus the dates you first and last saw it active. The difference is the ad's lifespan, the most useful number you will collect.
- Format (single image, video, carousel), aspect ratio and platforms.
- The offer and angle in a few words: "20% off first order", "free trial, no card", "founder story", "customer testimonial".
- Call to action and landing page. Click through once; the landing page often says more about the funnel than the ad.
- Number of versions, and for EU and UK ads the estimated reach each week, so you can see which ads are growing.
- A screenshot or saved creative, because outside the EU and UK the ad vanishes once it stops.
What the log tells you after a month
After four weekly passes, sort each competitor's ads by lifespan. The long-running ones are their current winners: study the offer, the first line of text and the opening seconds of the video, because those survived the advertiser's own testing. Ads that vanished within a week or two are tests that lost, which tells you which angles were tried and dropped without you paying to learn it. If three competitors independently converged on the same angle, say "no contract", that is probably what the market responds to, and your ads need an answer to it.
Keep the conclusions separate from the copying. The Library is for understanding a market, not lifting someone's creative. Using a competitor's images, video or trademarks can breach Meta's advertising policies and intellectual-property law, and a clone rarely performs like the original, because the brand behind it is not yours.
Using the Ad Library API, and asking Claude to do it for you
Meta publishes an official Ad Library API, the ads_archive endpoint of the Graph API, so the routine above can be automated. Access is free but gated: the person whose token is used must confirm their identity and location with Meta (the same check required to run political ads), create a Meta for Developers account and app, and accept the API terms. The main parameters are ad_reached_countries (required), search_terms or search_page_ids (up to ten Pages), ad_type, ad_active_status, a delivery date range, publisher_platforms, languages, and search_type for exact-phrase or unordered keyword matching.
One limit surprises nearly everyone. Meta's reference states that ads that did not reach any location in the EU are returned only if they are about social issues, elections or politics. So a commercial API search in the US, Canada, Australia or Israel comes back empty even though the website shows the advertiser's ads. That is Meta's rule, not a broken integration. Search an EU country where the advertiser also sells, use the website, or check Google's Ads Transparency Center for the same brand's Search and YouTube ads.
Every result carries the Library ID, Page, dates, creative text, languages, platforms and an ad_snapshot_url that renders the ad; the API does not return image or video files. EU-delivered ads add eu_total_reach and the reach and targeting breakdowns (Meta lists the UK for those too). Spend, impressions and demographic distribution come back only for political and issue ads.
If you would rather not maintain a script, MCP Ads exposes the same official API as tools your AI assistant can call, and runs lookups through its own verified identity so you skip Meta's ID check. The Facebook Ad Library API page shows the tools and example responses, and the Meta Ad Library docs cover each one. In Claude or ChatGPT a session looks like this:
- "Find the Ad Library Page for [brand] in Ireland and list the ads it is running now, with start dates and platforms."
- "Which of those have been running for more than 60 days? Summarise the offer and angle of each." This is the lifespan analysis above in one step.
- "For the three longest-running ads, show the EU reach and targeting." Only EU and UK delivery has this data.
- "What is [US competitor] running on Google in the US?" When a non-EU Meta search is empty, the same connection covers the Ads Transparency Center, as described on the competitor ad research page.
Limits and common mistakes
Most bad conclusions from the Library come from treating it as something it is not.
- Reading an empty API result as "no ads". Outside the EU, a commercial API search is always empty. Check the country, and confirm on the website.
- Estimating a competitor's spend. There is no public source for commercial spend on Meta. A tool showing a spend figure for a commercial advertiser is modelling it; treat it as a guess.
- Assuming the number of ads equals budget. Some advertisers run dozens of low-budget variations, others two ads with most of the money behind them. EU reach is a better indicator of scale than ad count.
- Missing Pages. Brands often advertise from several Pages, or through creator and partner Pages. Search the brand name as a keyword too.
- Confusing eligibility with delivery. The platform icons show where an ad may run, not where its impressions went.
- Relying on the Library as your archive. Outside the EU and UK, ads disappear when they stop.
