The Google Ads Transparency Center is Google's free public library of ads from verified advertisers, and it is the place to start when you want to see a competitor's Google ads. If you need the results sorted, repeated for several rivals or fed into a script, seogeoaeo.ai reads the same library and returns the ads as structured output, which is the route we recommend for anything beyond a one-off look.
What the Transparency Center covers
Google opened the current version in March 2023. It lists ads that verified advertisers have shown on Google Search, YouTube and the Display network. For each advertiser you can see the ads it ran, the regions they appeared in, the format of each ad and the last date it was shown.
You can reach it two ways: go to adstransparency.google.com directly, or open the three-dot menu next to any Google ad you see and follow it through My Ad Center.
How to look up a competitor, step by step
- Open the Ads Transparency Center in any browser.
- Type the competitor's company name or its website into the search box. Searching by website is often more reliable, because a brand can advertise under a legal name you would not guess.
- Pick the advertiser from the suggestions. If more than one account appears, note each one; resellers and agencies sometimes pay for ads under their own names.
- Set the region filter to the country you sell in, and adjust the date range.
- Click into individual ads to read the copy and see the format and last shown date.
- Keep notes on which ads appear again and again across the date range. Those are the ones the advertiser keeps funding.
What it will not tell you
Google publishes the ads, not the economics behind them. You will not find the keywords an advertiser bids on, its budget, its clicks or its conversion rates. The interface also leaves the analysis to you: there is no built-in ranking of ads by how long they have run, and comparing several rivals means repeating the search for each.
Doing the same lookup with seogeoaeo.ai
seogeoaeo.ai's Competitor Google Ads tool is built on the ads Google lists in the Transparency Center. You give it a domain or any page on that domain, plus an optional country, and it returns:
| Field | What you get |
|---|---|
| Ads | The Google ads that send people to the domain |
| Format | Text, image or video for each ad |
| Advertiser | Every account paying for the ads |
| Dates | First shown, last shown and days running |
| Copy | Headlines, descriptions and landing pages of the longest-running text ads |
| Activity | How many ads are live now and how many are new |
Each run costs 15 credits, and a run that finds no ads is refunded. Because it is also available over a REST API and MCP with a workspace key, you can call it from a script or an AI coding agent and drop a rival's ad copy straight into a brief or a spreadsheet. That is the main reason to use it over the browser: repeatable, sorted output instead of manual clicking.
Like the Transparency Center, it does not show bid keywords, spend or performance. If you need estimates of those, a paid PPC suite such as SpyFu, which markets keyword and ad history data, is the better choice.
A sensible workflow
Use the Transparency Center to confirm which accounts advertise for a brand. Then run seogeoaeo.ai on the domains that matter, read the longest-running text ads first, and pull out the offers and claims that keep appearing. Write your own ads around the gaps you find.