How to check if a company is running Google ads (and whether the ads are measured)

Open adstransparency.google.com, search the company's domain or brand name, and Google will show you every ad that advertiser runs, with last-shown dates and the regions where they appeared, no login needed. To check whether those ads are actually measured, view the source of the company's website and search for gtag, GTM- and AW-, which takes two minutes and tells you whether their clicks are being counted as leads.

I use both checks weekly, on competitors, on prospects and on accounts I am about to take over. Here is the exact method.

How do I check in the Ads Transparency Center?

Go to adstransparency.google.com in any browser. Type the company's website domain into the search box, or their brand name if you do not know the domain, and pick the advertiser from the results. Google's description of the tool is that you search by advertiser name or website name and filter the results by serving region and date, and the region filter is the one to set first, because an advertiser can be busy in one country and absent in the next. You will see a grid of every ad that advertiser has run recently: search text ads, display images and video, each with the date it was last shown and the regions it appeared in.

The last-shown date is the most useful field on the page. An ad last shown yesterday means the campaign is live right now. A wall of ads that all stopped months ago means the advertiser paused or ran out of budget, and that date tells you roughly when. The regions tell you where they are targeting, which matters if you are checking whether a national competitor has started advertising in your province.

Two timing rules explain most of the confusion I see: Google says information about an ad can take 48 to 72 hours to appear after it is first shown, and an ad that has not served in the past 365 days drops out of the archive. You also get up to five common variations of an ad rather than every version running.

What does it show and what does it hide?

One more limit matters before you treat the archive as proof. The ads are no longer clickable, because Google says the Transparency Center was never meant for landing page verification and is moving to static screenshots, so read the visible URL and type it in yourself. Everyone listed has been through Google's advertiser identity verification, which asks for legal documentation carrying a name and location.

How do I spot their ads in live search?

The live check answers what a customer sees at the moment they search. Search the company's brand name, then two or three phrases you would expect them to bid on, and look for the Sponsored label above the top listings. That label is the only visible difference between a paid placement and an earned one.

Turn your ad blocker off before you start, because a blocker strips the ads out of the page and leaves you deciding that a competitor has stopped advertising when they have not, and what serves also depends on where you search from, which is why the archive's region filter is sturdier evidence. To find out who is behind an ad, Google's route is More or Info on the ad and then About this advertiser on Google services, or More or AdChoices and then Why this ad on partner sites. Do not click the ad to get there, because that charges them for a visitor who was never going to buy anything.

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The Sponsored label above the first organic result is the only thing separating paid from earned here. That single word is what most people miss, and it is why asking a business whether they run ads is less reliable than looking.

Can I see a company's Meta and Instagram ads too?

Yes, and the tool is the Meta Ad Library at facebook.com/ads/library. Meta describes it as a place to search for ads running across its products, which covers Facebook and Instagram, and for ordinary advertisers you can search the ads that are currently active. Search the page name, pick the company, and you get the creative they are spending on right now.

Only one category gets more than that. For ads about social issues, elections or politics you can also search ads that are no longer running, with who funded the ad, a range of how much was spent and the reach across demographics, stored for seven years. Nothing similar exists for a hardware shop advertising a sale, so the Meta library tells you what a company is saying today and the Google archive tells you what they have said for a year.

What do third-party tools add?

Semrush's Advertising Research and SpyFu answer the question the platform archives refuse to, which is what a competitor spends and which keywords they bid on. Neither company can see the advertiser's account, so those figures are modelled from their own data rather than reported by Google, and the honest use for them is as a hypothesis about where the money goes. Coverage varies by market, so a thin profile there is no evidence that a business stopped advertising.

How do I tell whether the ads are actually measured?

Running ads and measuring ads are separate facts, and the second one decides whether the money is being spent intelligently. On the company's website, right-click and choose View Page Source, then search the page (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for three strings. Finding gtag means a Google tag is installed. Finding GTM- means the site loads Google Tag Manager, a container that holds the site's measurement tags. Finding AW- means a Google Ads conversion tag is present, which is the piece that actually counts leads.

If you found a GTM- ID but no AW-, there is one more public step. Google Tag Manager containers are publicly readable at googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=GTM-XXXX, with the site's own ID in place of the X's. Open that URL and search the text for AW-. If a conversion tag is configured inside the container, it will appear there even though the raw page source never mentioned it. This second look matters more than people expect: in one verification sweep in 2026, 30 of the 70 tracking problems I had flagged from page sources turned out to be false alarms once I checked inside the GTM containers. Treat the page source as the first pass and the container as the confirmation, and if containers are unfamiliar ground, here is what one is and how to read it.

Why does the measurement check matter more than the ads check?

Because unmeasured spend rots quietly. Google's smart bidding runs on conversion data, degrades without it and re-learns slowly after a fix, so every untagged week costs performance beyond that week. Remarketing audiences decay daily while a site is untagged, and those lost visitors are not recoverable later. Website relaunches commonly break tags and redirects without anyone noticing, which is why a site that advertised confidently last year can be flying blind this year. And measurement can be wrong in the flattering direction too: in one account I took over in 2026, 75% of all clicks were counted as conversions because the tag fired on page load rather than on an actual lead, so the reports looked wonderful while the business got nothing.

What does all this tell me before a sales call or a takeover?

The first use is checking a competitor. You learn whether they advertise at all, which formats they trust, how long their current ads have been running and which regions they care about, and you learn it in five minutes.

The second use is checking your own agency. If you pay a monthly retainer, search your own domain and look at the last-shown dates. Your ads should have been shown this week, and the creative should match what you approved. I have met business owners paying retainers for campaigns the Transparency Center showed as stopped weeks earlier. Nobody inside the platform will volunteer that; the public record will.

The third use is checking a prospect before you pitch them, if you sell marketing services. A real business with no ads showing is a prospect; a business already running current, well-organised ads needs a different conversation.

These two checks are the public half of a framework I use on every account, where the ads record is the money check and the measurement gap is the gap check. The full version, including the receipt that ties ad-platform numbers to the client's own enquiry records, is written up at the three receipts. I run paid media and build the conversion tracking under it, and most of my work starts with exactly the checks on this page.

By the time you get on the call the ads are public and the tags are public, and the only figure still missing is how many enquiries the spending produced, which is usually the number nobody on the other side has counted.