How to See Other Companies' Facebook Ads

You do not need a tool, a login, or a competitor's permission to look at the ads another company is running. Meta publishes every active ad on Facebook and Instagram in a free, public archive, and anyone can search it. This guide is the practical version: where to look, how to find the right Page, which filters change what you see, and the one number sitting in that archive that almost nobody uses.

How do you see another company's Facebook ads? Open the Meta Ad Library, set the country to the market you care about, choose the "All ads" category, and search for the company's Facebook Page name. Every ad that company is running appears, with the creative, the ad copy, the call to action and the date the ad started running. No account and no payment are required.

What you can see, and what you cannot

The archive is a transparency product, not an analytics product, and the difference decides what you can do with it. Meta describes the full set of tools it publishes in its Transparency Centre.

For any active commercial ad, you can see:

• the creative itself, exactly as it runs, including every variant of the same ad
• the primary text, the headline and the call-to-action button
• the date the ad started running
• which platforms it is delivering on, which is how you tell a Facebook-only campaign from one that also runs on Instagram
• the Page running it, and the other ads that Page has live at the same time

You cannot see spend, targeting, click-through rate, conversions or return on ad spend. Meta publishes spend and impression ranges for ads about social issues, elections and politics, and for commercial advertising it publishes neither. Any page that offers you a competitor's Facebook ad spend is offering you a model, not a figure Meta released. We explain how that modelling works, and where it breaks, in our guide to finding a competitor's Facebook ad spend.

Step 1: open the library and set the country first

The country selector is the first control on the page and the one most people leave alone. It is not a filter on a global result set. Meta shows you the ads delivered in the country you pick, so a brand that runs an aggressive campaign in the United States and a small one in the United Kingdom looks like two different advertisers depending on which country is selected. If you are studying a competitor in a market you sell into, set that market before you search, and check a second market before you conclude anything about how much they advertise.

Then set the ad category. "All ads" is what you want for commercial advertising. The "Issues, elections or politics" category is a separate archive with different rules and different data, and leaving it selected is the most common reason a search returns nothing.

Step 2: search the Page name, not the brand name

The library searches advertisers by their Facebook Page name, and a Page name is not always the name on the website. This is the step that quietly fails, and no result is easy to mistake for no ads.

Three things to try when a search comes back empty:

• Look for a localised Page. Large brands often run each market from its own Page, so the ads you want may sit under a name with a country or language suffix rather than the global Page you searched.
• Check the legal entity. A brand owned by a group may advertise under the parent's Page, or under a subsidiary whose name never appears in the marketing.
• Go through the Page itself. Open the company's Facebook Page and use its transparency section, which links directly to the ads that Page is running. That route never depends on guessing a name.

Searching by keyword rather than by advertiser is the other half of this. Advertiser search answers "what is this company running". Keyword search answers "who is running ads about this thing", which is how you find competitors you did not know you had, and how you see how an entire category is being sold.

Step 3: filter down to what you actually want to study

An established advertiser can have hundreds of live ads, most of them variants. The filters are what turn that into something readable.

• Active or inactive. Active ads tell you what a competitor is doing now. Inactive ads tell you what they stopped doing, which is often the more useful half.
• Platform. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. A creative built for one and pushed to all four usually looks it.
• Media type. Image, video and carousel. Filtering to one format at a time is the fastest way to see which format a competitor is actually committed to, as opposed to testing.

Step 4: read the run dates before you read the creative

The start date is the most valuable field in the archive, because it is the closest thing to a performance signal that Meta publishes for commercial ads. Nobody keeps a losing ad running.

An ad that has been live for four months has survived every optimisation decision its owner made in those four months. An ad that launched last week has survived nothing. When you sort a competitor's ads by how long they have been running, the top of that list is the closest you will get to their proven creative, and the bottom of it is their current test batch. Both are worth knowing, and they teach you opposite things: the long-running ads show you what works in the category, and the new ones show you where the competitor thinks the category is going.

The number everyone misses: delivered reach in the EU and the UK

Almost every guide to this subject tells you that performance data is hidden and stops there. That is not quite the whole picture.

Meta publishes delivered reach for ads shown in the EU and the UK. For those ads, the transparency panel you are already looking at carries how many people the ad reached, along with a breakdown of that reach by age, gender and country. The legal driver is the EU Digital Services Act, and the UK figures sit in the same panel.

This changes what the archive is good for. Run duration tells you an ad survived. Delivered reach tells you how far it travelled while it survived. Divide reach by the number of days the ad has been running and you have a daily reach figure, which is how you rank one competitor's ads against each other rather than just listing them.

Four limits matter, and a page that hides any of them is misleading you:

• Coverage is EU and UK delivery only. A brand that delivers no ads in the EU or the UK has no reach figures at all.
• Reach counts people, while a CPM prices impressions. Turning reach into a spend estimate gives you a floor, not a budget.
• Reach is Meta's published number. Any spend figure built on top of it is modelled, and should never be quoted without the word estimated beside it.
• One ad's reach is not a campaign, and it is certainly not an account.

Wilow's free Meta Ads Library search reads that field for you. Search any brand and country without an account, and each ad is shown alongside the reach it has delivered, so the ads sort themselves by how widely they actually ran instead of by when they appeared.

Save what you find, because the creatives expire

Meta serves ad images and videos from links that stop working within days. An ad you bookmarked last week may already be a dead image, and an ad that goes inactive leaves the active view entirely. The archive is a live window, not a library you can come back to.

So anything worth studying has to be captured when you find it, not when you need it. Save the creative itself rather than the link, and save the three things you cannot recover later: the date it started running, the platforms it ran on, and the landing page it pointed at. Those three fields are what let you reconstruct a competitor's strategy months afterwards, and they are the first things to disappear.

A twenty-minute weekly routine

Doing this once tells you very little. The value is in the delta, and the delta only exists if you look on a schedule.

• Pick five competitors and note, for each, the number of live ads and their three longest-running creatives.
• Come back weekly and record what changed: new ads, ads that stopped, a format the account has started leaning on.
• Watch for the launches. A sudden cluster of new ads in one week is a campaign or a product going live, and it is visible here before it is visible anywhere else.
• Watch for the retirements. An ad that ran for six months and then stopped usually means it finally fatigued, which tells you roughly how long a concept lasts in your category.

Once you have a set of ads worth reading properly, the useful question stops being "what are they running" and becomes "what are they arguing". Our POSTER framework is the structure we use to read a brand's advertising along those lines: the offer, the audience it speaks to, and the style it uses to do it.

Where the line is on copying

Looking at a competitor's advertising is exactly what the archive was built for. Meta publishes it deliberately, and using it is neither a grey area nor a trick.

Reproducing a competitor's creative is a different thing, and the risk is not mainly a legal one. An ad works because of the offer behind it, the audience it was built for and the brand making the promise. Lifted into your account, the same creative carries none of those. What travels between accounts is structure, not execution: the shape of the hook, the order the argument is made in, the objection handled before the price. Take the structure and write your own.

Frequently asked questions

Can you see other companies' Facebook ads without an account?

Yes. The Meta Ad Library is public and requires no Facebook account and no login. Some of Meta's research tools, such as the Ad Library API, require an application and approval, but the searchable archive itself does not.

Can a company tell that you looked at their ads?

No. The archive gives advertisers no notification and no viewer data. Whoever is looking at your ads is invisible to you, and you are invisible to them.

Why does a company show no ads when you know they advertise?

The three usual causes, in order: the country selector is set to a market they do not run ads in, the ad category is still set to issues and politics, or their Page name is not the name you searched. Going in through the company's own Facebook Page rules out the third.

Can you see Instagram ads in the same place?

Yes. The archive covers Meta's platforms together, so an ad running on Instagram appears in the same results as one running on Facebook, and the platform filter separates them.

How far back does the archive go?

Retention differs by ad type and by region, and it is shorter for commercial advertising than most people assume. Treat anything you find as available now rather than archived permanently, which is the practical reason to save what you want to keep at the moment you find it.

Start with one competitor

Pick the competitor whose advertising you are least sure about and give it twenty minutes: set the country, find the Page, filter to active ads, and sort by how long each ad has been running. Search any brand in Wilow's free Meta Ads Library, no account needed, and the reach each ad has delivered is shown beside it.