Google's Official Ad Archive: What You Can and Can't Find
Google publishes an official ad archive: free, open to anyone, and good at answering one question — what ads has this advertiser run? It cannot answer "who is bidding on my brand name" or "how many advertisers are buying traffic for this domain" — the first because there is no keyword-level search, the second because it requires aggregation across advertisers. This post goes through what it does, what it doesn't, and how to close the gaps.
What it is
The archive is the public ad library Google has run since 2023. Per Google's own documentation it covers ads served on Search, Display, Gmail, and YouTube, and includes only ads from advertisers who have completed identity verification.
It is free and requires no login. Anyone can look up exactly what we can — it is the sole source behind this site. We hold no non-public records; the difference is entirely in how the data is organized.
What you can find
| Capability | Official interface | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Search by advertiser name | Yes | Google's wording: "search for an advertiser using the advertiser or website name" |
| Search by website name | Yes | Same |
| Filter by serving region | Yes | Documented filters are date and targeted location |
| Filter by date range | Yes | Same |
| View the creative itself | Yes | Image, video and text ads as served |
| Advertiser name and location | Yes | Including the paying entity |
| Targeting info and reach | EEA only | EEA ads additionally disclose targeting information, total number of recipients, and a subject matter label |
For "I want to see what this company has been advertising lately," the official interface is completely sufficient and should be your first stop.
What you can't find
The six gaps below are structural. They are not settings you haven't found.
1. No keyword search.
This is the big one. You cannot enter a search term and get back the advertisers bidding on it. There is a thread in Google's own support community asking for exactly this feature; the answer is that it does not exist. Any tool claiming to give you "competitor keyword bid data" is giving you modeled inference, not archive fact — us included. Nobody has access to what someone else paid for a keyword.
2. No aggregation or counting across advertisers.
"How many advertisers push this domain?", "How many distinct landing domains does this advertiser run?", "Rank these by creative volume" — questions like these require collapsing thousands of records into counts. The official interface is a paginated creative browser: no counts, no sorting, no top-N.
3. No time series.
How long a creative has been running, when it started, when it stopped, whether spend is expanding or contracting — all of that requires comparing snapshots of the same entity over time. The archive tells you what is in it now, not how it got there.
4. No bulk export and no public API.
No CSV download, nothing to pipe into your own BI stack. Building a weekly report means taking screenshots by hand.
5. No monitoring or alerts.
There is nothing to subscribe to. If you want to know whether a new advertiser started bidding on your brand next week, someone has to remember to search again — which is precisely the kind of task that gets dropped.
6. The retention period is not documented.
Google's help pages do not state how long ads remain in the archive. That means the evidence you can see today is not guaranteed to be there next year. If you are building a trademark complaint, capture screenshots and creative IDs at the moment you find them; do not plan to come back for it.
Closing the gaps
| What you want to know | Official interface | How to get it |
|---|---|---|
| What ads this company runs | Works, use it | — |
| Who is buying traffic for my domain | No aggregation | Domain search lists every advertiser per domain |
| Which landing pages an advertiser runs | No aggregation | Advertiser detail page, grouped by landing domain — e.g. Dealer Spike |
| Which domains many advertisers push at once | No sorting | Multi-advertiser domain directory |
| Who is most active right now | No sorting | Rankings |
| How long an ad has been running | No history | First-seen / last-seen dates and duration on the detail page |
| Keyword-level bids | Not available | No source has this. Distrust anyone who claims otherwise |
Take linktr.ee as an example. On the official interface you can page through related ads indefinitely, but reaching the conclusion "over 400,000 advertisers are driving traffic to this domain" requires reading the landing URL off every creative, collapsing it to a root domain, and de-duplicating by advertiser. That is not a button that exists somewhere in the UI — it is a separate pipeline. The same gap runs in the other direction: to establish that Yellow Book USA, Inc points at more than 7,000 distinct landing domains, you would have to open every one of its ads and record where each lands. Ours is documented in What Is PPCEye? Data Sources, Coverage, and Methodology.
Practical advice
- Verify against the official interface first. It is the authoritative source; any third-party conclusion, including ours, should be checkable there.
- Capture evidence when you find it. Retention is undocumented — save the screenshot, the creative ID, and the date of your query together.
- Reach for a third-party tool only when you need aggregation, ranking, history or monitoring. If you just want to see what a company's ads look like, don't pay for that.
- Be skeptical of "keyword bid data." The field does not exist in the archive. Whatever you are shown is an estimate.
FAQ
Does the archive contain every Google ad?
No. It contains ads from identity-verified advertisers served on Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube. Ads from unverified advertisers, or outside that scope, do not appear.
Why can't I find my own company?
The advertiser entity may be registered under a different name than the one you searched — a legal entity name versus a brand name is the most common cause. Volume may also be too low, or activity too old. Try searching by website name instead of company name.
Can I see an ad's landing page URL?
The interface shows the creative as served. For search-network image ads, the landing address is typically just text printed on the image rather than a searchable structured field — turning it into queryable data requires optical character recognition.
What is the extra EEA data?
Ads served in the European Economic Area additionally disclose targeting information, total recipients, and a subject matter label, as required by the EU Digital Services Act. Other regions do not carry these fields.
Is this the same as the Meta Ad Library?
Same idea, different coverage: the Meta Ad Library covers Facebook and Instagram, Google's archive covers Google's surfaces. Neither contains the other.
Descriptions of official capabilities follow Google's own help documentation, verified 2026-08-15. Google can change the interface and its policies at any time — the official pages take precedence.