Is there a Google Ads Transparency Center API?

No public one. The Center is a website that shows 40 ads at a time and has no export. A scraper reads the same public pages without a login and returns the fields as a table.

Can I see all the ads a competitor runs on Google?

Yes. Search the advertiser by name or paste its advertiser ID; every ad it ran since 2018 is listed with format, first and last shown dates, the countries it ran in and a preview. Filter by platform (Search, YouTube, Maps, Shopping, Play) and by date.

Does the scraper return the ad text?

Video ads return the YouTube video id and thumbnail, shopping and local ads return product titles and store names. Classic text ads are published by Google as rendered screenshots, so their copy is an image, as on the site itself.

$0.50 per 1,000 ads, details and media included, no start fee. Comparable Actors charge $1.50 to $2 per 1,000 plus start fees or separate detail fees.

Google Ads Transparency Center scraper and API: every ad of any advertiser

Since 2023 Google publishes every ad run by a verified advertiser in its Ads Transparency Center: Search, YouTube, Maps, Shopping and Play, back to 2018. The site shows 40 ads at a time and has no export or API. This page shows how to get an advertiser's or a website's ads as a table, what each row contains, what the previews hold, and what it costs.

Updated September 2026. Fields and limits measured on the live site.

What the Transparency Center offers, and what it does not

Route	What you get
adstransparency.google.com	Search by advertiser name or website, 40 ads per scroll, filters by region, date, platform and format, an ad page with preview variants and the regions it ran in. No export, no API.
Google Ads API	Your own account's campaigns only. Nothing about other advertisers.
Political ads report	Spend and impressions, but only for election ads in verified countries.
Scraper	The public Center pages as rows: advertiser, format, dates, regions, previews, video ids. This is what the scraper reads.

The scraper

The Google Ads Transparency Scraper on Apify takes advertiser names, advertiser IDs, website domains or Transparency Center URLs and returns one row per ad. Three levels of detail, all in the price:

Listing: advertiserId, advertiserName, creativeId, url, format (text, image, video), firstShown, lastShown, one preview. About 80 bytes per ad, hundreds per second.
Details (default): regions with the last day the ad ran in each country, every preview variant, the exact last-shown date, plus advertiserCountry, advertiserLegalName and advertiserVerified.
Media and texts (option): videoId, videoUrl and thumbnailUrl for video ads, imageUrls, and texts with product titles and store names of shopping and local ads.

Filters: region (any of 249 countries or worldwide), platforms, formats, shown-after and shown-before dates, a cap per source.

Calling it from code

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/alfalfa~google-ads-transparency-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"advertisers":["Nike"],"region":"US","platforms":["youtube"],"includeMedia":true,"maxAds":200}'

Longer jobs: start the run, poll it, read the dataset when it finishes. Schedules, webhooks and the n8n, Make and Zapier nodes work as for any Apify Actor; the API overview shows the pattern.

Things to know before you trust the numbers

Text ads are screenshots. Google renders search text ads as images in the Center. The screenshot URL is in the row; the copy is not machine-readable without OCR.
Search by advertiser or website only. There is no search inside ad text, on Google's site or anywhere else.
Names are ambiguous. "Nike" matches Nike, Inc. (US), NIKE SRL (IT) and a few more. The scraper takes exact name matches first, then the account with the most ads; set a higher cap per name to get all of them, or use the advertiser ID.
Counts are approximate. Google says "~9K ads"; the scraper collects what the pages return, page by page.
No spend, impressions or targeting outside political ads.

Uses that pay for themselves

Competitor monitoring. A weekly run per competitor with a shown-after date; new creative IDs are new campaigns, long-running ads are the ones that convert.
Video creative research. YouTube ads of the top brands in a niche as watchable links, not thumbnails.
Agency prospecting. Who advertises a domain, since when, how much, verified or not.
Brand protection. Affiliates and resellers bidding on your name or pointing ads at your domain.

Questions people ask

Is this allowed?

The Transparency Center exists to be looked at, by anyone, without an account. The scraper reads those public pages and stores nothing but the results in your dataset. Creatives remain the advertisers' copyright.

Why is it this cheap?

An ad in the listing is a few dozen bytes, a detail a few hundred. Platform costs per thousand ads are a fraction of a cent, and the price is set per ad with no start fee.

How does it compare to the Meta Ad Library?

Meta publishes ad text, creatives and EU reach in a searchable library with keyword search; Google publishes previews and dates, searchable by advertiser. The Facebook Ads Library guide covers the Meta side; both scrapers cost $0.50 per 1,000 ads.

Open the Google Ads Transparency Scraper Read: the Meta Ad Library guide