Facebook Ads Library: How to Search Any Website's Ads – https://www.thekeyword.co/

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The Meta Ad Library is free competitive intelligence sitting in plain sight. Here is how to use it systematically — not just scroll and screenshot.
The Facebook Ads Library — officially called the Meta Ad Library — is a free, public database of every active ad running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. Meta launched it in 2019 for political ad transparency, and it now covers commercial ads from any advertiser running campaigns on Meta’s platforms.
You can search by brand name or keyword, filter by country and platform, and see every live ad a competitor is running right now. No login, no subscription, no cost. It is the most underused competitive intelligence tool in performance marketing — sitting in plain sight at facebook.com/ads/library.
Most marketers treat the Ad Library like a phone book: search a brand, scroll, screenshot, done. But used systematically, it answers questions that used to require expensive spy tools or insider access:
Go to facebook.com/ads/library in any browser. No Facebook account required for browsing commercial ads. You will see a search bar and a small set of filters. That is the entire tool — simple enough that most people miss half of what it can do.
There is no dedicated app. It works on desktop and mobile browsers identically. For power users, Meta also provides an API (the Ad Library API) that lets developers pull ad data programmatically, though it requires Meta developer registration and has rate limits.
The most common thing people actually want from the Ad Library is not “show me Nike’s ads.” It is “show me what this website is running.” Paste the domain straight into the search bar — gymshark.com, not “Gymshark.” It works because a Meta ad carries its display link and caption alongside the creative, and the advertiser’s domain almost always sits in that caption.
Two caveats before you trust the result. First, this is a text match, not a URL field filter: an ad that merely mentions the domain in its body copy will match, and an ad routed through a redirect or an unfamiliar subdomain may not. Second, one company often advertises from several Pages — regional accounts, sub-brands, agency-managed Pages — so a domain search rarely returns the complete set on its own.
Treat the domain search as the way in, not the answer. Click any matching ad through to the advertiser’s Page inside the Ad Library, then browse that Page’s live ads directly. The Page view is the authoritative list; the domain search is the shortcut that finds it. If you want to see what the finished picture looks like for a single brand, Gymshark’s live Meta ads are a useful worked example — one brand’s entire running set, in one view.
Set your country and ad category, open the advertiser’s Page, then set ad status to Active. The result total printed above the ad grid — “327 results” — is that Page’s active ad count. There is no separate counter anywhere in the tool. That header line is the number.
Read it as a snapshot, not an account total. The figure moves with the filters you set: change the country, the ad category, or the query mode and the number changes with it. It also drifts day to day as ads pause, exhaust budget, or become ineligible in a given market. If you are tracking a competitor’s ad volume over time, record the country and filters alongside the number — otherwise the series will not compare to itself.
The keyword search has three modes, and knowing which one you are in changes what comes back:
You can stack quoted phrases — "air jordan" "just do it" matches each as a phrase — but mixing quoted and unquoted terms falls back to unordered keyword matching across everything you typed. If precision matters, quote every term.
Do not open the library and type a brand name at random. Start with a question: “How is Nike positioning their new running shoe launch?” or “What offers are DTC supplement brands running this month?” The question determines what you search, how you filter, and what you are looking for in the results.
Type a brand name like “Nike” or a keyword like “free trial.” For brand searches, the library will suggest matching Facebook pages — pick the verified official page, not fan pages or regional variants. For keyword searches, the library returns ads whose ad copy contains your term.
Pick the market you are competing in. If you are targeting US customers, set the country to United States. If you are researching EU markets, pick a specific country — EU ads have richer data (impression ranges, demographic breakdowns) thanks to the Digital Services Act.
Filter to Facebook only, Instagram only, or all platforms. Then filter by media type: image, video, or carousel. The combination reveals where a brand is investing. A brand running video on Instagram and static images on Facebook is making a deliberate platform-by-platform creative decision.
For each ad, look beyond the creative. Check the start date — how long has it been running? Check if the same creative appears with variations (different copy, same image). Check which platforms it is running on. The metadata tells you more about strategy than the creative itself does.
What it shows: Active ad creative (images, videos, carousels), full ad copy, CTA button, start date, active status, platform delivery (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), and the landing page URL. For UK and EU ads, it also shows impression ranges and demographic reach breakdowns. For political ads, it shows spend ranges and funding sources.
What it does not show: Actual spend or budget, conversion data, click-through rates, cost per result, targeting parameters, audience size, or any performance metric. The Ad Library tells you what is running — not what is working. That is the gap every third-party tool exists to fill.
The closest thing to a performance signal is longevity. An ad that has been active for 90+ days with multiple creative variations is a strong indicator that it is performing. Advertisers do not keep paying for ads that do not work.
Meta’s Ad Library shows every ad in one long, unsorted wall. There is no ranking, no grouping by run time, no way to separate what a brand launched this week from what has been running for months. You have to scroll and guess. It is a transparency tool, not a competitive research tool — Meta built it for regulators, not marketers.
That is why tools like Wilow’s Meta Ads Library exist. Wilow takes the same public ad data and adds the layer marketers actually need: ads grouped by how long they have been running (fresh vs. proven), a daily-reach ranking that shows which ads are earning the most delivery, and the ability to browse any brand’s complete live ad library with one click. It is the same public data — just organised for the job you are actually doing.
The embed below is the live Wilow Ad Library — the same tool that runs at trywilow.com. Search any brand, or open a curated vertical, and click into any ad. Free, no login needed.
Search your top three competitors weekly. Note what is new, what has been pulled, and what has been running consistently. Over a month, you will have a clear picture of their testing cadence and which angles they are scaling.
Search your product category (not a specific brand) and filter by video. Study the first three seconds, the hook structures, the aspect ratios. This is free creative strategy research at the category level — no spy tool needed.
Change the country filter to a market you are considering entering. Search your product category. See who is already advertising, what their offers look like, and how saturated the feed is. The Ad Library is a free market intelligence tool for international expansion.
Click through from any ad to see the landing page. Note the offer, the page structure, the pricing presentation. The ad-to-landing-page chain is the full funnel — and the Ad Library gives you the front door to every competitor’s funnel for free.
The Ad Library is the start of the workflow, not the end. Your competitive research should feed directly into your creative brief: the hooks that are dominating your category, the formats your competitors are scaling, the offers that are getting the most airtime. Combine what you learn with your own performance data — your CTRs, your conversion rates, your CPA by format — and you are not just copying competitors. You are making informed creative decisions.
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