Apify Actor

Get a competitor's Google ads without a browser, a subscription, or a crawler of your own

This scraper reads the Google Ads Transparency Center directly by domain, advertiser ID, or Transparency Center URL. It returns each ad's creative image, format, first/last shown dates, and — new — the actual headline and body text, read out of the creative via OCR. A built-in watch mode turns it into a daily competitor-launch feed.

Open the Actor on Apify →

Five ways people use it

Each of these is a ready-to-run preset with its input already filled in — no need to read the full API docs first.

Extract Google ad headlines and body copy new

Google archives text ads as images — there is no headline or description field anywhere in the public data. This preset runs OCR over the archived creative and returns the actual ad copy.

Build a competitor image-ad swipe file

Archive every image ad a competitor is running into your own key-value store, before Google's URLs expire.

Pull a competitor's YouTube video ad IDs

Get the YouTube video ID and URL behind a competitor's video ads, wherever the creative renderer exposes one.

Run a separate watch feed per client

Agencies: keep each client's competitor-launch memory isolated with a per-project state key, so concurrent schedules never overwrite each other.

Check whether a lead's company runs Google ads

A quick yes/no signal for sales prospecting or an agency pitch: does this domain advertise on Google at all?

What comes back for every ad

The fields that matter most. Full reference is on the Actor's Input/Output tabs.

creativeText

Headline and body, read via OCR

previewImageUrl

The creative itself

advertiserName / legalName

Who's running it

firstShownAt / lastShownAt

How long it's been running

isNew

Watch-mode launch flag

youtubeVideoId

For video ads