How to see competitor Google ads without SpyFu

You can see competitor Google ads without SpyFu in about ten minutes, using one free Google tool and, if you want the results ranked and summarized, one small paid report. This guide walks through both, then shows how to pull the same data from a terminal or a coding agent.

What you can and cannot see

Set expectations first. Google publishes the ads that verified advertisers run, but it does not publish the keywords they bid on, their budgets or their click numbers. So:

• You can see: the ad copy, the format (text, image, video), where and when the ads ran, and which advertiser accounts are behind them.
• You cannot see from Google: bid keywords, spend, click-through rate or conversions.

Tools that list a rival's paid keywords, SpyFu included, are building estimates. That can still be useful, but treat the numbers as a model, not a record.

Step 1: Search the Ads Transparency Center

1. Open adstransparency.google.com.
2. Type the competitor's brand name or its domain, for example example.com.
3. Pick the advertiser from the suggestions. If a reseller or agency runs ads for the brand, you may see more than one account.
4. Filter by region and by format. Text ads are the ones that show on the search results page.
5. Open an ad to see its copy and the last date it was shown.

Google launched this center in March 2023 and builds it from its own records, so the copy is exactly what ran. It covers Search, YouTube and Display.

Where it falls short: results are not sorted by how long an ad has run, and you cannot start from a keyword. When a rival has hundreds of ads, finding the ones it keeps paying for is slow work.

Step 2: Get a ranked summary with Competitor Google Ads

The Competitor Google Ads report on seogeoaeo.ai does that sorting for you. Enter the competitor's website and pick a country, or all countries. It returns:

• how many Google ads point at the site and in which formats
• how long each ad has been showing
• the headlines and descriptions of the longest-running text ads

The reasoning: an ad that has run for months is one the advertiser keeps paying for, which makes it the best clue to what converts for them. The report samples the 100 ads shown most recently and reads the copy of up to ten text ads. It does not show spend, performance or bid keywords.

A run costs 15 credits. The smallest plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits, and a run that fails costs nothing.

Step 3: Pair the ads with the searches behind them

Ads tell you what a rival says. To guess where it says it, look at the searches it wins organically. Competitor Keywords (35 credits) lists a site's Google rankings with volume, difficulty and cost per click, and marks the terms worth bidding on. If a keyword has a high cost per click and the rival also ranks for it, there is a fair chance it advertises there too, though no tool can confirm that.

Step 4: Check the other ad networks

Plenty of competitors spend more on social than on search. Two 5-credit tools cover that:

• Meta Ad Finder: the Facebook and Instagram ads a page is running now, with wording, call to action, landing page and start date.
• LinkedIn Ad Finder: a company's LinkedIn ads, with headlines, start and stop dates and the impressions range LinkedIn publishes.

Doing it from the terminal

Every seogeoaeo.ai plan includes REST and MCP access. Create an API key, then:

curl -X POST https://seogeoaeo.ai/api/v1/tools/competitor-google-ads/runs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SEOGEOAEO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input":{"url":"https://www.example.com","market":"us"}}'

Add "maxCredits": 15 to the body if you want the call refused rather than charged at a higher price. In Claude Code or Cursor, add the MCP endpoint https://seogeoaeo.ai/api/mcp with your key and ask the agent to pull the ads for a list of rivals.

When SpyFu is still the right tool

SpyFu says it keeps the history of every ad test a competitor has run, across more than 18 years and 38 countries, and it suggests negative keywords from what rivals tried and dropped. If you need that long view, these steps will not replace it. For a current look at a rival's ads, they cover it for free or for 15 credits.