Every ad running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Meta's audience network is public. Meta publishes all of it in the Meta Ad Library, free, no account required. You can open it right now and see every active ad any advertiser on earth is running.
That is the good news. The bad news is that most people who open it search once, get a wall of loosely related results, and close the tab. The library rewards a specific method. This is that method, plus an honest account of what the library will never tell you.
Start with the advertiser, not the keyword
The library offers two ways in: search a keyword, or search an advertiser. Keyword search is the tempting one and the weaker one. It returns every ad whose text contains your phrase, across every advertiser in the country you selected, which means a search for a category term buries the three companies you care about under hundreds you do not.
The reliable move is to resolve the advertiser first. Go to the company's own website, find the Instagram or Facebook link in their footer, and open that page. That step matters more than it sounds: brand names are shared, and searching a name inside the library often surfaces lookalike pages, fan pages, and resellers. The company's own site is the only source that tells you which page is really theirs.
Once you have the real page, the library shows you everything that page is running. On the page itself, the About section links to its ads. Inside the library, set the country filter, set the ad category to all ads, and search the exact page name. Confirm you have the right one by matching the page's profile image and follower context before you read anything else.
The search moves that work
A few habits separate a useful session from a frustrating one:
Quote exact phrases. Keyword search with a phrase in quotation marks returns ads containing that exact wording. This is how you find every advertiser using a specific claim, hook, or offer line in your market.
Filter by platform and media type. The filters narrow results to Instagram only, or to video only. If you want to know how a competitor treats Reels versus static feed placements, this is the fastest way to see it.
Open See ad details. Each result expands to show every version of that ad: alternate headlines, alternate creatives, the landing page it points to. An ad with many versions is an ad being tested seriously.
Check the start date on everything. Every ad shows the date it began running. Sort your reading around this. An ad that started last week tells you what a competitor is trying. An ad that started fourteen months ago tells you what worked.
What the library shows
For every active ad: the full creative, the ad copy, the date it started running, which platforms it runs on, the number of versions, and the destination it clicks through to. For ads shown in the European Union, Meta also publishes reach information and broad demographic delivery, because EU law requires it. For social issue, electoral, and political ads, the library keeps an archive going back years and publishes spend ranges.
What it hides
For a normal commercial advertiser, which is every competitor you care about, the library shows no spend, no impressions, no clicks, no conversions, and no targeting. You cannot see whether an ad has a dollar a day behind it or a thousand. You cannot see whether it is winning. And once a commercial ad stops running, it disappears: there is no history tab, no archive of what an advertiser ran last year.
This is the part most guides skip, and it changes how you read the library. Since performance is invisible, longevity is your stand-in for it. Advertisers kill ads that lose money. An ad that has run for months, in many versions, is the closest thing to public proof of performance that Meta gives you. Volume means interest. Longevity means results.
The library shows no spend and no performance. Longevity is the closest thing to proof it gives you.
Reading a competitor in twenty minutes
Put together, a pass on one competitor looks like this. Resolve their real page from their own website. Pull their full ad list in the library. Count the ads. Note the oldest start date. Note the format split: video, image, carousel. Open the three oldest ads in detail and read the versions and the landing pages. Write down the offer each ad leads with. You now know more about that company's marketing than most of their own staff.
Then multiply that by every competitor in your market, and repeat it monthly, because the library only shows you today. That is where the manual method gets expensive. The tool is free. The hours are not.
That recurring work is the part we run as a service. Request a free ad benchmark for your market: Muffin Intel tracks the ads, we read them, the written benchmark lands inside one business day.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Meta Ad Library free?
Yes, completely. It is a public website, no Facebook account or login required, and it covers every active ad on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Meta's audience network in every country. Meta publishes it as a transparency measure. There is no paid tier and no rate limit that matters for manual research.
Can I see how much a competitor spends on Facebook ads?
No. For commercial advertisers the library shows no spend data at all, and no tool can read it out of the library because it is not there. Spend ranges are published only for social issue, electoral, and political ads. Anyone quoting an exact monthly Meta spend figure for a normal business is modeling, not reporting. The honest approach is covered in our guide to estimating competitor ad spend.
Can I see ads a competitor ran in the past?
Only in special cases. Political and issue ads are archived for years. Ordinary commercial ads vanish from the library when they stop running. This is the strongest argument for checking your market on a schedule rather than once: the library is a live window, not a record. If you want history, someone has to be collecting it continuously.
Why can't I find a company in the Ad Library?
Three common reasons. First, they are genuinely not advertising, which is more common than most people expect. Second, you searched a name and landed on the wrong page: always resolve the real page from the company's own website first. Third, they advertise under a different page than their brand name, such as a parent company or a location-specific page. Check the website footer and the Instagram profile linked from it before concluding a company is dark.
Free
See what your market is advertising
Written by Sarah Mitchell, Muffin Media
Want this run on your brief?
