Before you pay for a LinkedIn ads spy tool, read the free library

Most people shopping for a LinkedIn ads spy tool can stop at LinkedIn itself. The free LinkedIn Ad Library already lists the ads companies run there, live ones and those that stopped within the past year, with the format, the advertiser and the payer. Spend is the one thing people hope a spy tool will reveal, and LinkedIn does not publish it, so no tool can read it from the library. What a tool can add is speed: the seogeoaeo.ai LinkedIn Ad Finder sorts one company's ads by how long they have run, for 5 credits a run.

So the real question is not how to spy. It is how much reading you want to do yourself.

The spying is a public web page

LinkedIn runs the Ad Library as a publicly available database, and describes it in its help center as part of keeping ads trusted. Anyone can search it by company or advertiser name, payer name, keyword, country or date range. As of November 2026 it covers ads that ran after June 1, 2023, and an ad stays listed for a year after its last impression.

Every listing has a preview of the ad, the ad format, the advertiser, the payer and whether the ad is restricted. Restricted ads lose the preview and the names, which LinkedIn says it does to comply with the law.

Ads aimed at the European Union come with more. LinkedIn adds an estimated impressions total and a breakdown by country, the dates the ad ran, and the kinds of targeting the advertiser used, marked as include or exclude. For a rival that sells in Europe, that is the most detailed view LinkedIn gives of any ad, and it costs nothing.

What no spy tool can see

LinkedIn does not publish what an advertiser spends or how many people clicked. A tool that reads the public library inherits those gaps. If a product shows a LinkedIn spend number for a competitor, treat it as an estimate and ask how it was made.

Targeting outside the EU is the same story. The library only shows targeting for EU-targeted ads, so a US-only campaign gives away its message but not its audience.

Free library or paid report

The Ad Finder takes a company name and one country or every country. It labels each ad by type, whether a single image, a video, a carousel, a document or a message ad, and adds the headline, description, call to action and landing page of the longest runners, the start and end dates, and the impressions range when LinkedIn publishes one. If nothing turns up, the credits come back.

Who should skip the tool

If you look at one rival once a quarter, the LinkedIn Ad Library is all you need. The same goes for anyone who wants the creative, the payer search, or the EU targeting, which the report does not include. The tool pays off when the checks repeat: several brands, every month, with someone who wants the proven ads at the top rather than a feed to scroll. For that job, the seogeoaeo.ai LinkedIn Ad Finder is the honest version of an ads spy tool, because it only reports what LinkedIn actually publishes.