How do I use the Meta Ad Library to see what competitors are running?

It is Meta's public record of every ad currently running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads and the Audience Network, with the creative, the copy, the start date, the platforms and, for some ads, an estimate of reach. Meta built it for transparency after 2018 and it covers every advertiser, not only political ones. It is free and it needs no login for most ads.

You reach it at facebook.com/ads/library. The default view is "All ads" filtered to active ads in your country.

Type an advertiser's name into the search box and pick their page from the dropdown. That is the reliable path: the page is the unit the library indexes. Then:

• Set the country. An ad targeted only at the UK will not show under United States.
• Switch "Active ads" to "All ads" if you want what they used to run. Inactive ads keep their creative and dates for years.
• Use the filters for platform (Instagram only, for instance) and media type (image, video).
• Open an ad's "See ad details" for the start date, whether it is active, the platforms, and for EU-targeted ads the reach and audience breakdown.

Keyword search exists, but it matches words in the ad copy only. "Protein powder" finds ads whose copy says protein powder, not ads about protein powder that say "gains" and "scoop". Category research through the keyword box is slow and misses most of the market.

Two things, before anything about the creative itself.

The start date. Meta advertisers turn off what does not work within days. An ad that started six months ago and is still active has been paying for itself for six months. Of the supplement ads in Dovey's index on September 24, 2026, the median had run 57 days and 224 of 601 had run 90 days or more. Those 224 are the ones to study.

How many ads share the creative. The library shows "N ads use this creative and text" on collapsed entries. A brand that has spun one idea into twelve versions is telling you the idea works and they are scaling it. Buildify's "Build apps with AI" has run 341 days with 129 versions. That is not an accident.

Then the creative: the first line of copy (the hook), the offer, the proof (reviews, counts, guarantees), whether a person appears, and the CTA.

• Performance. No spend, impressions, clicks or conversions for ordinary ads. Only political and issue ads, and ads targeted at the EU, carry spend and reach ranges. Anyone showing you a CTR from the Ad Library is guessing.
• Targeting. Nothing about audiences outside the EU block.
• Ranking. It sorts newest first. You cannot ask for the top-performing ads in a category.
• Meaning. It cannot find "skincare ads with a before and after". It finds words.
• Video content. You can play a video; you cannot read what it says or search for a hook.

When you have one competitor in mind and an hour. Open their page, switch to all ads, sort mentally by start date, and take notes. It is free and it is the source of truth. Doing this for one brand a week is a better habit than most paid tools.

It stops being enough when the question is about a category ("what runs for meal kits"), a pattern ("which hooks last"), or scale (twenty competitors, every week). At that point the work is reading thousands of ads, and that is what a search on top of the library is for.

Dovey reads the Ad Library through a licensed provider, indexes the ads, has a model read every creative (hook, angle, offer, format, who appears) and watch the videos, and ranks the top performers first by run time and variations. So "skincare ads with before and after" is a search, "which angles perform best for gyms" is a question, and every result links back to its Ad Library page. Search in plain words; sign up to see the results, with a 3-day free trial.