How to see a competitor's Facebook and Instagram ads, for free, and what you can't see

Every brand that advertises on Facebook or Instagram has its active ads on public display. Meta publishes them so anyone can check who is advertising what. For an ecommerce team, that makes a rival's ads the easiest competitive signal to read, and one of the easiest to misread.

Step by step: a competitor's active ads

1. Open Meta's public ads tool. Search the web for Meta's ads transparency tool; it is free and needs no Facebook account.
2. Choose the country and "All ads". The country filter shows the ads a brand runs to people in that country. A brand can run completely different ads in the US and in Germany.
3. Search for the brand. Type the brand's name and pick its Facebook Page from the list, so you don't get every advertiser that mentions the word.
4. Read each ad. You see the copy, the image or video, the call to action, the start date, the platforms it runs on, and how many versions of the same ad exist.
5. Or start from the Facebook Page. On the brand's Facebook Page, Page transparency says whether the Page is running ads and links to them.

What the free tool won't show you

• Spend. Meta shows spend only for ads about social issues, elections or politics. A clothing brand's budget is not public.
• Old ads, outside the EU and UK. For commercial ads, the tool keeps ads that stopped running only when they were shown in the EU or UK, with estimated reach for EU ads, because EU and UK rules require it; in the EU, the Digital Services Act requires large platforms to publish those ads for a year. Anywhere else, an ad vanishes from the tool when it stops, so last month's Black Friday teaser is gone.
• Changes over time. The tool shows today. It does not tell you what is new since last week, which ads a rival stopped, or how its message shifted.
• Where the ad lands. An ad can point to a page that no longer exists or a product that sold out. You only find out by clicking through.
• More than one brand at a time. Comparing five rivals means five searches, every time.

How to read what you find

Count versions, not just ads. Many near-identical versions of one ad usually mean the brand is testing copy or images, or letting Meta mix creatives automatically. A single ad that has run for weeks is usually a proven winner.

Check the start dates. Ads rarely run long. The median Meta ad that ended in September 2026 had run for 6 days, across 6,855 ended ads from the stores RivalSweeper monitors (How long do Meta ads run?). An ad that is still live after a month is worth a closer look.

Follow the link. An estimated 60% of the brand-verified Meta ads live in September 2026 linked to a category page, 30% to a product page and 4.8% to the homepage. The landing page tells you which products the brand is pushing. Sometimes it tells you more: of 5,896 live Meta ads whose landing page RivalSweeper checked between November 2 and 4, 2026, 52 (0.9%) led to a page that no longer exists, and those ads came from 8 of the 43 stores checked. A rival paying to send shoppers to a dead page may be handing you some of them.

Tracking competitors' ads over time

The manual method works for a one-off look. It breaks down when you want to know what changed: a new campaign, a creative swap, a sale teaser that went live overnight. That needs the same check every day, kept with dates.

RivalSweeper does that for every competitor you monitor. Each day it collects the Meta ads they show in the EU or UK and keeps them with their dates, copy, links and run length, so new and stopped ads are visible side by side across rivals. It also records competitors' Google ads activity across Search, Shopping and YouTube (Google ad text itself is not readable), and its Ad & Deal Health check flags live ads that land on a missing page, a sold-out product or an offer that has already ended.

One honest limit: RivalSweeper collects commercial Meta ads only when they reach people in the EU or UK. A brand that advertises only in the US can show few or no Meta ads in RivalSweeper, even while its active ads are visible in Meta's tool.