Glossary
What is the Meta Ad Library and how do you use it?
Updated
Definition
The Meta Ad Library is Meta's public, searchable archive of the ads currently running across Facebook, Instagram, and its other surfaces, published so anyone can see what any advertiser is running.
Search any brand and the library returns its active ads: the creative, the copy, the start date, the platforms each ad runs on, and whether it is active. For most commercial ads that is where the transparency ends. Spend, targeting, and performance stay hidden except for political and social-issue ads, which carry spend ranges and demographic breakdowns and are retained for years after they stop running. Ads in the EU carry additional targeting transparency under the DSA.
The practical challenge is scale and churn. An aggressive advertiser can have thousands of ads live at once: Liquid Death alone ran roughly 5,000 active Meta ads in the US when we measured on August 10, 2026 (5,184 that day; the count moves daily). And across the brands Waldo tracks daily, 83% of live Meta ads launched within the last 30 days, which means any manual screenshot session describes a fleet that will be mostly replaced within a month.
That churn is why serious competitive use is programmatic: daily pulls per tracked brand, so every ad's first-seen and last-seen dates are recorded and volume becomes a trendline instead of a snapshot. A single visit answers "what are they running today"; only continuous measurement answers "what did they launch this month, what did they kill, and what has survived long enough to be working."
How this shows up in Waldo
Waldo tracks the Meta Ad Library daily for every tracked brand, alongside the Google and LinkedIn libraries, through one API: 121,000+ ads analyzed, 52,000+ live this week across roughly 270 brands. Every result carries the native library ID and a deep link back to the original listing, so any number can be opened back to the ad behind it.
Questions teams ask
Does the Meta Ad Library show ad spend?
Only for political and social-issue ads, and only as ranges. Commercial ads show creative, copy, start date, platforms, and active status, but no spend, targeting, or performance data outside the EU's DSA-mandated disclosures.
How long do ads stay in the Meta Ad Library?
Commercial ads generally appear only while they are active; political and social-issue ads are archived for years after they stop. This is why a competitor's history disappears unless someone was recording it while it ran.
Can you search the Meta Ad Library by API?
Meta's own API access is scoped to political and issue ads in most regions. Third-party platforms like Waldo track the commercial library continuously and expose it over an API, including cross-platform search spanning Meta, Google, and LinkedIn in one call.
Related terms and reading
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