How to find your competitors' best ads (and ignore the tests)

Here's something a lot of small brands don't realise: every ad a competitor is running right now is public. Meta and Google both publish them in searchable libraries. Getting access is easy. The hard part is that a large brand may have hundreds or even a thousand live ads at once, and most of them are experiments. This guide shows a free method for separating the proven ads from the noise, built around one simple signal: how long an ad has been running.

1. Search the Meta Ad Library

Open facebook.com/ads/library. No login is needed. Choose the country you sell in, set the ad category to "All ads", and type the competitor's name. Select their official page from the suggestions, then filter to Active ads only.

Every result shows the creative, the copy, the placements it runs on (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network) and a line that says "Started running on" followed by a date. That date is the most useful piece of information on the card.

2. Sort the long-runners from the experiments

Brands launch lots of ads, watch the numbers for a few days and switch off the ones that don't pay. Whatever is still live after months is almost certainly profitable, because nobody keeps funding an ad that loses money.

Two real snapshots from 8 November 2026 (United States):

• Gymshark had about 380 active Meta ads, and nearly every one of them had started in the previous week. That's a brand in the middle of a testing round. Picking one of those to imitate is a guess.
• AG1 had roughly 1,300 active ads in Meta's Ad Library, and over on Google one of its video ads had been live since 16 June, a run of 146 days. That single ad tells you more than the other thousand.

A practical rule: build your swipe file from ads that have survived at least 60 to 90 days. Skip anything launched in the last week or two unless you see the same idea repeated in many versions.

3. Repeat the search on Google

Google's equivalent is the Ads Transparency Center at adstransparency.google.com. Search for the advertiser, pick a region and you'll see their search, YouTube and display ads, each with first-shown and last-shown dates. Many brands test new ideas on Meta and keep their steady performers running on Google, so you only get the full picture by checking both.

4. Note what the winners share

Once you have a handful of long-running ads, look for patterns rather than individual clever lines:

• The hook: the opening line of copy, or the first two seconds of a video.
• The offer: a bundle, free shipping, a discount, a free gift with the first order.
• The format: talking head, demo, customer testimonial, simple static image.
• Variations: one concept running in many versions usually means the brand found something that works and is now scaling it.

Borrow the mechanic (the angle, the offer structure, the format). Never copy someone else's actual creative.

The quicker route: ask ChatGPT

Doing all of this by hand for five competitors can easily take an afternoon. We built Puley so ChatGPT or Claude can do the looking up for you. In ChatGPT, type @, choose Puley, and ask something like:

Which ads is [brand] running in the US right now, and which have been running the longest?

Puley brings a sample of the brand's live Meta and Google ads into the conversation along with their start dates, and ChatGPT ranks them by run time. When we asked about AG1, the 146-day Google video above came straight to the top. Keep in mind it's a sample, not a complete export, so for a full audit you should still open both libraries. As a way to find the proven ads in about a minute, though, it works well.

There's a short walkthrough of the whole workflow here: How to spy on competitor ads with ChatGPT. Puley works inside ChatGPT and Claude, and you can start with $2 free, no card, at puley.com.