The Transparency Center archives search ads as rendered images, so the headline and body copy are not text fields you can query. Here is what that means in practice.
Google stores text ads in the Transparency Center as images (simgad URLs). There is
no headline or description string in the underlying data — not hidden, not paywalled, simply absent.
A scraper that promises you Google ad copy is either reading the pixels or getting it somewhere
else.
Our scraper runs OCR over the archived creative and returns the recovered text in
creativeText, labelled as a reading rather than a published field, so you can tell the
difference between what Google said and what we recognised.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Creative images | archived to storage, so the URLs do not expire out from under you |
| Format and platform | Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, Play |
| First and last shown dates | how long a creative has been in rotation |
| Verified advertiser name | the legal entity Google verified |
youtubeVideoId | only when the renderer exposes one — roughly 3 in 10 video ads |
Watch mode is the reason this exists. A daily run returns only creatives that are new since the last run, so monitoring a competitor costs a few cents a day rather than re-downloading their whole catalogue.
Give each client a separate State key and this Actor reports only that client's newly launched ads on every scheduled run — no cross-client mixups.
Give a domain and see if that company runs Google ads at all — a quick signal for sales prospecting, agency pitches, or lead scoring.
Archive every image ad a competitor runs on Google with permanent copies — Google's own URLs expire. Built for creative swipe files and design research.
Watch a competitor's Google ads automatically. This preset tracks nike.com and returns only newly launched ads on every run after the first — a few cents a day.
Search a competitor's video ads and pull the YouTube video ID + URL wherever the renderer exposes one — ready to embed or track separately.
Pull the headline and body text out of a competitor's Google search ads via OCR on the archived creative. No official API returns this text — only pixels.