Where the data comes from, how it is aggregated, how often it updates, and what it cannot tell you. Every claim here is checkable, one record at a time, against the official archive.
A Single Source
Every ad record on this site comes from the Google Ads Transparency Center — the public ad archive Google has operated since 2023. It is free, needs no account, and anyone can look up the same records. We hold no non-public data. The difference is that we organize it into something searchable, aggregatable, and sortable.
How the Data Is Built
Collection. The official endpoints are queried along two paths — by advertiser and by domain — returning creative records, delivery geography, and first/last-seen dates.
Landing-page recognition. Search-network image ads carry no structured landing URL — the address is just text printed on the image. We read it off the creative with optical character recognition.
Collapse to a root domain. Recognized URLs are reduced to a root domain, so every creative resolves to exactly one domain and the definition stays consistent site-wide.
Aggregation. Advertiser counts per domain and landing-domain counts per advertiser — precisely the two numbers the official interface cannot produce.
Crawls run continuously, with more frequent refreshes for active entities. This is a snapshot, not live data. Every detail page states its own cutoff — trust that, not the date on an article or on this page. The same goes for coverage: the advertiser directory and the multi-advertiser domain directory render the current totals on the page itself.
What We Cannot Tell You
Keyword-level bids or spend. The archive has no keyword field, and no source has this data. Anything presented as competitor keyword bids is modeled from panels, not observed.
Advertisers who never verified. The archive only contains identity-verified advertisers, and our coverage inherits that boundary.
Landing pages OCR cannot read. When the image is low quality, the URL is cropped, or the address is rendered as artwork, that creative has no attributable domain.
How long records survive. Google does not publish an archive retention period, so capture evidence when you find it rather than assuming you can return to it.
Authorship and Corrections
Articles are published under the PPCEye team rather than an individual byline. Any figure quoted for a specific advertiser or domain links to that page, so you can click through to the current value — if they disagree, the page is right and the data has moved on.
Found an error or an inconsistency? Email [email protected]. We correct the article and update its modified date.