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 use 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. 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.

What does it show and what does it hide?

What can you actually use this for?

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.

How do I check whether the ads are 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.

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.

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.