Google Ads Transparency Center API: 8 ways to get the data

If you're pitching a new agency client or tracking three competitors for your SaaS team, you want to see their Google ads: the format, text, and how long they've run. The Google Ads Transparency Center lists all of this across Search, YouTube, Shopping, Maps, and Play.

The site lets you look up one advertiser at a time but can't export most of its data. Tracking five competitors each week takes a lot of clicks or code.

I checked the limits of Google's official options in its docs, then used AnyAPI's Google ads endpoints to get ads for five project management brands: Asana, ClickUp, monday.com, Notion, and Smartsheet. Prices for the other options come from their own pages.

The best Google Ads Transparency Center APIs

• Google Ads API for your own campaigns
• Google's BigQuery datasets for European and political ads
• AnyAPI for tracking competitors by domain
• SerpApi for teams already on SerpApi
• SearchApi for impressions on a monthly plan
• ScrapeCreators for the most fields per ad
• Apify Google ads scrapers for bulk runs with ad text read from images
• DataForSEO for bulk listings with other SEO data

What makes a good Google Ads Transparency Center API?

This comparison assumes you want your competitors' ads or your clients' competitors' ads. You need the following.

• Finding the right advertiser. A company's legal name can differ from its brand. Searching by domain saves you guessing.
• The full list, newest first. A busy SaaS brand can have tens of thousands of ads. You need current ads and a way to page through the rest.
• Run dates. If a competitor still shows an ad a year later, they keep using it, often because it works. First and last shown dates help you find these ads.
• The words and the landing page. A format and preview image tell you an ad exists. Its headline, text, and destination show what your competitor is promoting.
• Reach, where Google shows it. Google publishes impression ranges for some ads, mostly in Europe. These are the closest you can get to a competitor's spending.

The best Google Ads Transparency Center APIs at a glance

Best Google Ads API for your own campaigns

Google Ads API

Google Ads API pros:

• Google's own data for every campaign, ad, and keyword you run
• Spend, clicks, and conversions, which no transparency tool shows
• Free

Google Ads API cons:

• Only accounts you own or manage
• No way to look at another advertiser's ads

Agencies and tools use the Google Ads API to create ads, change bids, and get performance reports from code. You sign in with OAuth as an advertiser or a manager acting for clients. You can only access that sign-in's accounts.

Use it for clients whose ads you manage. It includes data the Transparency Center leaves out, like the cost of each click.

It can't show you a competitor's ads. You can't search other advertisers. Google has retired developer tokens, so your OAuth credentials' Google Cloud project now determines access, from test accounts only to audited access with no daily cap.

Google Ads API pricing: no charge. You must apply for higher access levels; the highest requires a manual audit. Source: Google Ads API access levels.

Best Google ads transparency data for European and political ads

Google's BigQuery datasets

Google's BigQuery datasets pros:

• Free, official bulk data, without reading individual pages
• Impression ranges, first and last shown dates by country, and targeting types for ads served in Europe and Turkey
• A separate dataset for election ads, with spend and reach

Google's BigQuery datasets cons:

• Only ads served in the European Economic Area and Turkey, plus election ads
• No ad text, images, or landing pages, only a link to each ad's page

Google publishes two datasets in BigQuery, its data warehouse. The first terabyte of queries each month is free.

The Ads Transparency Center dataset covers ads served in the European Economic Area and Turkey. Each ad includes its advertiser, format, topic, and first and last shown dates and impression range by country. Google offers the same files as a free download. Its help page calls this its API access for European ads.

The political ads dataset covers election ads from verified advertisers, with targeting, reach, and spend.

If your competitors advertise in Europe, start here. Google's data is free, and its impression ranges are the closest available estimate of spending.

Neither dataset includes ad content. You get a link to each ad, without its headline or image. US-only competitors aren't in the Transparency Center dataset.

Google's BigQuery datasets pricing: Google pays for storage. Your first 1 TB of queries a month is free, then BigQuery's query pricing applies. Source: BigQuery public datasets.

Best Google Ads Transparency Center API for tracking competitors by domain

AnyAPI

AnyAPI pros:

• Lists up to 100 company ads by domain, newest first, with a cursor for the next page
• Ad text, image, and landing page for any single ad
• A backup source for the list call, billed per call from a prepaid wallet

AnyAPI cons:

• Text read from ad images can have extra spaces and misread letters
• Impression ranges and first shown dates are often empty. Impressions aren't split by country, but every ad lists its regions
• Ad lookups and advertiser searches each have one source, so calls fail if it's down

Use AnyAPI to track competitors for clients or in a tool you sell. Send a domain to google_ads.company_ads to get the company's ads.

curl -sS -X POST 'https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/google_ads.company_ads' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"domain":"asana.com"}'

This response includes one ad from Asana's list and the surrounding fields:

{
  "output": {
    "found": true,
    "data": {
      "adsEstimate": 8000,
      "nextCursor": "cur_23OOXJJz...",
      "ads": [
        {
          "advertiserName": "Asana, Inc.",
          "advertiserId": "AR06554691289986629633",
          "creativeId": "CR07954105924103176193",
          "format": "text",
          "domain": "asana.com",
          "firstShown": "2025-03-25T23:38:57Z",
          "lastShown": "2026-11-02T16:45:00Z",
          "adUrl": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR06554691289986629633/creative/CR07954105924103176193",
          "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/16851307775866800654"
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "costUsd": 0.00085,
  "items": 100
}

Search by domain because brand searches can miss ads. ClickUp advertises as Mango Technologies, its legal name. Searching "ClickUp" returned eight unrelated advertisers, including a garage door company and a Spanish legal tech firm. Searching clickup.com returned 100 of ClickUp's ads.

Use the domain the ads link to. Notion's ads link to notion.com. Searching its old domain, notion.so, returned nine ads: five from Notion's Japanese account and four from other businesses linking to notion.so pages.

Check the advertiser name, too. Domain searches find ads linking to that domain, so Smartsheet's list included two Marriott ads, and monday.com's had one from an unrelated advertiser. Name searches help find brands with several accounts: "monday.com" found four, including one with about 40,000 ads.

Every ad on each brand's first page had appeared in the past two days, showing what competitors run now. Asana's second page returned 100 different ads.

The list shows how long ads have run. About half of Asana's first 100 were first and last seen more than a year apart; ClickUp's were close behind. Notion's all started this year, none more than about six months ago. Asana's ads were almost all text, ClickUp's half video, and Notion's mostly image and video.

The list doesn't include ad text. To get it, send the adUrl to google_ads.ad_details. This Notion image ad response is trimmed to one of its three versions:

{
  "output": {
    "found": true,
    "data": {
      "format": "image",
      "firstShown": "2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z",
      "lastShown": "2026-11-02T15:20:26.000Z",
      "impressionsMin": 15000,
      "impressionsMax": 20000,
      "regions": [
        { "code": "NL", "name": "Netherlands" },
        { "code": "BE", "name": "Belgium" },
        { "code": "LU", "name": "Luxembourg" }
      ],
      "variations": [
        {
          "headline": "Project Management and Al",
          "description": "See how enterprise teams plan , build , and collaborate in one secure workspace . Learn more",
          "destinationUrl": "notion.com",
          "imageUrl": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/..."
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "costUsd": 0.0012
}

Text is read from the ad image, which adds spaces before commas and can mistake "AI" for "Al". You can read a competitor's message, but clean up the text before quoting it. Asana's longest-running text ad promoted a free social media calendar template and linked to a page for marketing teams.

Don't count on an impression range. Two of the six ads I checked had one, both Notion's. The other four returned null and an empty first shown date. Google publishes ranges for ads served in Europe and Turkey, so US-only ads probably won't have them. Every ad lists its regions, which tells you whether to expect a range. Video ads have no image, and some versions lack a headline. Notion's included headlines like "Work faster together with Notion", text, and a landing page.

google_ads.search takes a Transparency Center link and returns full ads with the number of days each ran. It bills per ad returned and took one to two minutes per call. Video ads include headlines and text, but text ads often return only an image. For 20 ads, a list call plus 20 lookups costs a little more but returns text for every ad. Use the list for routine checks, then look up ads you want to read.

AnyAPI pricing: $0.85 per 1,000 lists of up to 100 ads. If the cheapest source fails, a backup costs up to $1.20. Single ads cost $1.20 per 1,000; advertiser searches cost $1.20 per 1,000. google_ads.search costs $0.947619 per 1,000 ads returned, up to $0.0199 for a call of 20. You prepay without a plan. New accounts get free credit with no card required.

Best Google Ads Transparency Center API for teams already on SerpApi

SerpApi

SerpApi pros:

• Lists ads by advertiser or domain, with platform, format, region, and date filters
• Ad details include headline, text, landing page, and times shown per region
• One key for Google search results and dozens of other engines

SerpApi cons:

• Ad text and landing pages need a second search per ad
• $25 a month for 1,000 searches on the smallest plan; each page counts as one

SerpApi is a search results API. Its Google Ads Transparency Center engine lists ads with format, first and last shown dates, and total days shown. A separate ad details engine returns each ad's headline, text, image, landing page, and times shown per region.

If you already pay for SerpApi to track rankings, you can get competitor ads without another vendor. If you only need ads, costs add up quickly: every list page and ad lookup counts as a search on your monthly plan.

SerpApi pricing: 250 free searches a month; Starter is $25 a month for 1,000 searches. Source: serpapi.com/pricing.

Best Google Ads Transparency Center API for impressions on a monthly plan

SearchApi

SearchApi pros:

• Lists up to 100 ads per call by advertiser or domain, with a time period filter
• Ad details with headline, text, image, landing page, and impressions broken down by platform
• Finds advertiser IDs from a keyword

SearchApi cons:

• Ad text and landing pages need a second call per ad
• A monthly plan, starting at $40

SearchApi separates lists and ad details, like SerpApi. Lists contain up to 100 ads. Ad details include impression ranges by platform where Google publishes them.

If you make thousands of calls a month and want a fixed bill, its plan costs less per search than SerpApi's.

SearchApi pricing: 100 free requests, no card; Developer is $40 a month for 10,000 searches, billed per successful search. Source: searchapi.io/pricing.

Best Google Ads Transparency Center API for the most fields per ad

ScrapeCreators

ScrapeCreators pros:

• Company ads by domain, advertiser search, and ad details, each one credit
• Ad details include spend ranges, age, gender, location targeting, and per-region stats where Google publishes them
• Pay as you go, and credits never expire

ScrapeCreators cons:

• Ad text is read from images and may contain errors, its docs say
• The smallest pack is $47

ScrapeCreators sells credit-based social and ad library endpoints. Its Google ad details include more fields than any other single-ad call here: spend ranges, targeting, and regional stats, plus text and landing pages.

Start here if you want every field Google shows for an ad in one call. I didn't test how often spend and targeting fields are filled for ordinary commercial ads, so try your competitors' ads first.

ScrapeCreators pricing: 100 free credits; Freelance is $47 for 25,000 credits, one credit per call. Source: scrapecreators.com pricing.

Best Google Ads Transparency Center API for bulk runs with OCR

Apify Google ads scrapers

Apify Google ads scrapers pros:

• Full ads in one run, with headline, text, images, landing page, and days served
• Optional text recognition on image ads, and impressions by region on the most-used actor
• Runs on Apify's scheduler and saves data you can export

Apify Google ads scrapers cons:

• Actors have different authors, fields, and prices
• Runs take minutes, not seconds

An Apify actor is a scraper published to its Store. The best-rated Google ads actor, silva95gustavo's Google Ads Scraper, returns full ads with variations, run dates, days served, and impressions by region. It can also read text from image ads. Solidcode's is a little cheaper on paid plans but returns only images and dates.

If you already use Apify, it's an easy way to export every competitor's ads to a spreadsheet weekly. Check each actor's pricing tab: extras like video downloads cost more.

Apify Google ads scrapers pricing: per ad, by actor and plan: silva95gustavo's from $0.90 per 1,000 ads, solidcode's $0.80 to $1.50. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month. Source: each actor's Apify Store page.

Best Google Ads Transparency Center API for bulk listings with other SEO data

DataForSEO

DataForSEO pros:

• A fraction of a cent per queued page of 40 ads
• Lists by domain or by up to 25 advertiser IDs, with platform, format, and date filters
• Advertiser searches also priced per task

DataForSEO cons:

• No ad text or landing page in its documented fields
• Queued tasks aren't instant, and live calls cost about three times as much

DataForSEO sells SEO data per task. Its Google Ads search endpoint lists 40 ads at a time with preview images and first and last shown dates.

If you already buy DataForSEO's keyword and search data, you can use the same account to list advertisers across hundreds of domains. You'll need another tool for ad text.

DataForSEO pricing: $0.0006 per 40 ads queued, $0.0012 priority, $0.002 live; each additional 40 costs the same. Pay as you go. Source: DataForSEO's Google Ads Search pricing.

Which Google Ads Transparency Center API should you use?

• You manage the ad accounts and want performance data: the Google Ads API.
• Your competitors advertise in Europe and you want free impression ranges: Google's BigQuery dataset.
• You track competitors by domain and want ad copy on demand, paid by the call: AnyAPI.
• You already pay for SerpApi: its two Google ads engines.
• You want a fixed monthly bill with impressions by platform: SearchApi.
• You want the most fields per ad, including spend and targeting where Google shows them: ScrapeCreators.
• You want a scheduled export of full ads: an Apify actor.
• You already use DataForSEO and can skip the ad copy: DataForSEO.

Search by the domain the ads link to and save results each week to see which ads competitors keep paying for. The Google Ads API page lists every input. The Facebook Ad Library tool does the same job on Meta, and the Facebook Ad Library API guide compares ways to get Meta's ads from code.

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