Can I see how much a company spends on ads?

Not for regular commercial ads. Meta only publishes spend ranges for political and issue ads. For commercial ads in the EU you can see start dates, creatives, and audience reach — which is enough to judge whether a campaign is serious — but not the budget behind it. Google's Transparency Center shows no spend data at all.

Is it legal to look up a competitor's or prospect's ads?

Yes. Ad libraries are public by design — in the EU they are legally mandated under the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to publish every ad they serve to EU users and keep it available for a year. Nothing you see there is private data.

Can I tell if a company's ads are actually working?

Not directly — ad libraries show no performance metrics. The best public proxy is longevity: an ad that has run unchanged for months is very likely profitable. The second signal is whether the advertiser's website has conversion tracking installed; a business running ads with no tracking pixel cannot be measuring results.

How do I check if a website has a Meta Pixel or Google tag?

Open the site, view the page source, and search for connect.facebook.net or fbq( for the Meta Pixel, and googletagmanager.com or gtag( for Google's tag. Browser extensions like Meta Pixel Helper and Tag Assistant do the same with one click. CloseFast runs this check automatically for every business in a search.

How to See What Ads a Company Is Running (Free, No Tools Needed)

You can see every ad a company is currently running for free: search their name in Meta's Ad Library (facebook.com/ads/library) for Facebook and Instagram ads, and in the Google Ads Transparency Center (adstransparency.google.com) for Google and YouTube ads. In the EU, platforms are legally required under the Digital Services Act to publish every ad they serve — including when it started running and roughly who it reached.

Every major ad platform now runs a public ad library. If you know where to look, you can pull up a company's active campaigns — creatives, start dates, and (in the EU) even reach data — in about two minutes, without an account and without paying for a spy tool. This guide walks through each library, what it does and doesn't show, and how agencies turn this into a prospecting signal.

The two libraries that matter

	Meta Ad Library	Google Ads Transparency Center
Covers	Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network	Google Search, YouTube, Display, Shopping
URL	facebook.com/ads/library	adstransparency.google.com
Shows	Active ads, creatives, start dates; in the EU also reach and targeting summaries	Ads from verified advertisers, formats, dates, region
Spend data	Political/issue ads only	No
Account needed	No	No
API	Official API is political ads only	None

How to check Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram)

Go to facebook.com/ads/library.
Set the country to where the business operates (for EU coverage, pick the specific EU country — that unlocks the richest data, see below).
Set the ad category to "All ads".
Search the business name, or paste their Facebook page URL to jump straight to their page.
You'll see every ad the page is currently running: the creative, the copy, the platforms it runs on, and the date it started.

The start date is the single most useful field. An ad that has been running for three months is almost certainly making money — nobody pays Meta for 90 days straight on a loser. A wall of ads that all started last week usually means somebody is testing (or just hired an agency).

Why the EU version shows more

Under the EU's Digital Services Act, every ad served to EU users must be published in a searchable public archive — with its start date, the audience it reached, and roughly how it was targeted — and kept there for a year, even after the campaign ends. That's not a Meta feature that can be quietly removed; it's a legal obligation. For anyone prospecting European businesses, the EU Ad Library is the most complete public record of local ad activity that has ever existed.

One catch: Meta's official Ad Library API only returns political and issue ads. If you were hoping to automate commercial lookups through the API, it won't work — which is exactly why most "ad spy" tools are either expensive, political-only, or scraping the same public pages you can check by hand.

How to check Google & YouTube ads

Go to adstransparency.google.com.
Pick the region.
Search the company name or their domain.

You'll see ads from that verified advertiser across Search, YouTube, and Display, with formats and date ranges. There's no spend data and no API in any region, but for a yes/no answer to "is this business buying Google ads?" it takes thirty seconds.

What you still can't see

Ad libraries show you that a company advertises and what they show — not whether it works. There's no CTR, no conversion data, no ROAS. The two honest proxies:

Longevity. Long-running ads survive because they pay for themselves.
The tracking setup behind the ads. An ad campaign pointed at a website with no conversion tracking is flying blind — and that you can check from the outside, by looking for the Meta Pixel or Google tag in the site's source code.

The prospecting angle: ads without tracking

For agencies, the combination of these two public signals is worth more than either alone:

Running ads + no tracking pixel — they're spending money and can't measure a single conversion. The most urgent kind of prospect: they feel that something is off, and you can name exactly what.
No ads + competitors advertising — the gap writes the pitch for you.
Pixel installed + ads paused — they tried, something stopped them, and reactivation is an easier sale than education.

Checking one business by hand takes a few minutes across both libraries plus a view-source for the pixel. Checking an entire city's worth of dentists is a different job — that's the part CloseFast automates: it pulls local businesses from Google Maps, checks their ads activity and tracking setup, ranks the results by urgency, and writes a pitch that cites what it found.

Quick reference: all the ad libraries

Meta Ad Library — facebook.com/ads/library — Facebook, Instagram
Google Ads Transparency Center — adstransparency.google.com — Search, YouTube, Display
TikTok Commercial Content Library — library.tiktok.com — TikTok ads served in the EU
LinkedIn Ad Library — linkedin.com/ad-library — LinkedIn ads