Google Ads Transparency Scraper — Advertiser Ad Library Export

What this Actor scrapes

The Google Ads Transparency Center is Google's public registry of every ad campaign running on Search, YouTube, Display, Shopping, Maps, and Play. This Google Ads Transparency Scraper talks directly to Google's internal SearchService/SearchCreatives RPC — so it pulls fast, stable structured data without the overhead of a full browser session.

Google publishes no official API for this data. We reverse-engineered the RPC, replay it with a real-browser TLS fingerprint, and absorb all the reliability work so you get clean rows.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — every RPC call replays a real Firefox TLS+H2 handshake via curl-cffi, so Google's edge sees a browser, not a Python script.
• 🌐 Apify Proxy support — sticky-session proxying keeps cookie continuity across a target's pagination run.
• 🧱 Paced request cadence — a fixed gap between RPC pages keeps us under the SPA's own request rate.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — golden-file tested against four real creative shapes (static image, rich video, minimal, malformed) before every release.
• 💰 Pay-per-result pricing — a small per-run fee, then you're charged only for ad rows that actually land in your dataset. No data, no charge.
• 🧪 Batch input, deduplicated — scrape dozens of domains and advertiser IDs in a single run; overlapping creatives across targets are merged, not double-billed.
• 🔍 Bulk domain ad-screening mode — check a list of brand domains for Google Ads activity in one run without paying per creative; a domain with zero ads still finishes as a clean, successful result.

Use cases

• Competitor ad spend tracker — pull every Nike ad once a week and diff the creative set to see what launched; track competitor Google Ads spend without manually clicking through the Transparency Center UI.
• Trademark enforcement — monitor advertisers running ads against your brand keyword; combine with your own takedown workflow.
• Affiliate-fraud detection — flag advertisers whose landing domain doesn't match the advertiser name.
• Political-ad monitoring — track which advertisers are active in an election cycle.
• Brand-safety audits — for agencies, prove the ads currently live for a client before the QBR.
• Market research — observe how saturated a vertical (crypto, sports betting, supplements) is with active creatives.
• AI / RAG ingestion — feed creative metadata and image URLs into a vector store for image-grounded competitive analysis.
• Bulk domain ad screening — feed in a prospect list or a portfolio of brand domains and get back a yes/no "is this domain running Google Ads" flag per domain, with a rough ad count — a lead-qualification or compliance-sweep pass before you invest in per-creative pulls.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "searchDomains": [
    "nike.com",
    "adidas.com"
  ],
  "advertiserIds": [
    "AR03012025048987521025"
  ],
  "region": "US",
  "dateFrom": "2025-11-15",
  "dateTo": "2026-05-15",
  "maxResults": 5000,
  "maxPages": 25,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

advertiser_idadvertiser_namecreative_idcreative_urllanding_domainformat_typefirst_shown_tslast_shown_tsimpressionspreview_image_urlpreview_content_js_urlregionscraped_at

{
  "advertiser_id": "AR18378488041124659201",
  "advertiser_name": "Nike Retail BV",
  "creative_id": "CR15771942603307614209",
  "creative_url": "https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR18378488041124659201/creative/CR15771942603307614209?region=anywhere",
  "landing_domain": "nike.com",
  "format_type": 1,
  "first_shown_ts": 1761145807,
  "last_shown_ts": 1778871417,
  "impressions": 205,
  "preview_image_url": "https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/archive/simgad/12774179880874022668",
  "preview_content_js_url": null,
  "region": "anywhere",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-15T19:17:59+00:00"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Region is metadata, not a filter. Google's SearchCreatives RPC ignores the geo target — we confirmed this empirically (see scripts/recon/FINDINGS.md). The Transparency Center browser UI shows a region selector, but the server returns the same creative set regardless. We expose region so you can tag exports by intended locale, nothing more.
• No region-only browsing. You must supply a searchDomain or advertiserId. There is no "all ads in country X" mode on the public RPC. If Google adds one we'll wire it in.
• Video / rich creatives return a content.js URL, not an MP4. Rendering the actual video frame requires executing Google's JS bundle — out of scope for v1.
• Date range is enforced by Google, not us. They retain roughly 12 months of history. Requesting older dates clips to that window.
• Large advertisers hit pagination caps. Google's infrastructure stops responding past roughly 1 000 ads per query. Nike's library claims ~300 000 ads; the default maxPages=25 is intentionally conservative. Raise it for full-history pulls knowing you may hit the server-side ceiling.
• Screening mode's ad_count is a floor, not an exact total. It counts creatives actually pulled within maxPages/maxResults, same ceiling as per-creative mode above — a domain flagged has_ads_detected: true with ad_count: 40 may run more than 40 ads; raise maxPages if you need a tighter count.