Best ad intelligence tools (2026): who is running ads, and how to sell to them

We use treg for one-off ad library lookups by company or keyword across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok, Apify when we need the Meta Ad Library in bulk, and Blitz's ad spend filter when we build a list of companies that advertise. Deepline runs the same lookups inside scheduled plays.

Every major ad platform publishes a searchable library of the ads running on it. Free and first-hand, with less detail outside the EU.

These add history, spend and impression estimates, keyword data, and alerts. Search ad tools are cheap. Cross-channel spend estimates are priced for brands and agencies.

A company running paid ads has a marketing budget and someone accountable for the results. The ads themselves show what it is trying to sell, to whom, and with what offer. That is useful even if you do not sell anything to marketers.

For agencies and martech vendors, the ad is the product they will touch: weak creative, a generic landing page, or no retargeting is the opening. For everyone else, ads reveal launches, new markets, and new segments weeks before a press release.

The free libraries show creative and dates well, but outside the EU most commercial ads come without spend, reach, or targeting. Meta's API only returns EU-delivered and political ads. LinkedIn shows impressions and targeting only for EU-targeted ads.

Spend figures in paid tools are modeled estimates, built from panels and sampled impressions. Treat them as a ranking, such as large, medium, or small, rather than a number to quote in an email. Match each advertiser to a domain before you enrich, because advertiser names in the libraries are often legal entities or agency accounts.

Here is the play. Each week, check every account in your TAM for active ads on Meta, Google, and LinkedIn through an ad library API. Store the count of active ads per channel and the newest creative. Flag accounts that started advertising on a channel in the last 30 days or doubled their active ads. Those are the leads.

For each flagged account, find the head of demand generation or growth, plus the founder at smaller companies. Have a model read the newest ad and its landing page and write one line about the offer and the audience it targets. Open with that, then tie it to your product: more pipeline from the same spend, better follow-up on the leads the ads create, or faster creative. Send while the campaign is still live, since an ad that has stopped running is a dead reference.

Looking up a competitor's ads is free. The work is checking thousands of accounts every week, spotting the ones that changed, finding the person who owns the budget, and writing a line about their ad that does not sound scraped.

OneGTM builds ad-signal plays on treg, Apify, Blitz, and Deepline that check your accounts, flag new and growing advertisers, find the owner, and push them to Instantly or HeyReach. You own the data and the workflows.