Platform guide
Google Ads Transparency Center: what an API can get you
Google offers an API only for ads served in the EEA, so competitor research elsewhere runs through third-party routes. What two of them returned for ten advertisers on the same day, what the Center shows and does not show, and what it costs.
Written for people asking: Is there a Google Ads Transparency Center API?How do I get competitors' Google ads through an API?What does the Google Ads Transparency Center show for an advertiser?
Google's Ads Transparency Center has no general API. Google's help page says it provides API access to data about ads served in the EEA under the Center's terms, and nothing for the rest of the world, so competitor research on US advertisers runs through third-party routes that read the Center. On 15 September 2026 ScrapeCreators' company-ads route and SerpApi's Transparency Center route returned the identical 377 ads for the same ten domains, each with creative, format, first and last shown dates and the advertiser's domain, at $0.0019 and $0.015 a call respectively, in about a second. Neither returns ad text, active status, spend or impressions, because the Center shows a rendered creative and dates, not copy or performance. The one useful extra is the library size estimate: 4,000 ads for HubSpot, 80,000 for Shopify.
What Google offers, in Google’s words
From Google’s Ads Transparency Center help page, read 15 September 2026.
Coverage. The Center shows the ads an advertiser has served “over a certain time period for all advertisers serving ads on Google platforms”, across Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube. Per advertiser it shows the legal or trademark name and location from the verification programme, the payer name from the payment profile, and a verified or unverified badge.
The API. “Google provides API access to data about ads served in the EEA in the Ads Transparency Center”, subject to the Center’s terms of service. No developer documentation for that API could be found on a public page, and there is no API for ads served outside the EEA.
Extra fields for EEA ads. Targeting information, the total number of recipients for each ad, and a subject-matter label. Election ads carry additional disclosures where verification is required.
Spend. Not mentioned on the help page for commercial ads. The Center’s own pages are rendered in the browser and could not be read as text, so per-ad fields such as format and shown dates are reported below from what the routes returned, not from Google’s documentation.
Automated access. Google’s Terms of Service prohibit “using automated means to access content from any of our services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on our web pages” and bypassing protective measures. The third-party routes below are vendors reading the Center on your behalf; whether that fits your own compliance position is a question for you, not for this page.
The third-party routes, measured
Ten advertisers, one call each, first page, 15 September 2026. Raw responses on the evidence page.
| Route | Returned | Zero results | Results per call | Total | p50 | p95 | Cost per call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapeCreators · Google ads by domain | 10 | 0 | 40 | 377 | 1,123 ms | 1,425 ms | $0.0019 |
| ScrapeCreators · Google advertiser lookup | 10 | 1 | 7 | 62 | 960 ms | 1,961 ms | $0.0019 |
| SerpApi · Google Ads Transparency | 10 | 0 | 40 | 377 | 1,691 ms | 2,996 ms | $0.015 |
| Route | Records | Creative | First shown | Last shown | Format | Status | Spend | Reach | Domain | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapeCreators · Google ads by domain | 377 | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 100% | 0% |
| ScrapeCreators · Google advertiser lookup | 62 | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 100% | 0% | 100% |
| SerpApi · Google Ads Transparency | 377 | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 100% | 0% |
Reading the tables:
- Two routes, one dataset. ScrapeCreators’ company-ads route and SerpApi’s Transparency Center route returned the same 377 ads for the same ten domains, forty a page for eight of them, seventeen for Notion, with the same fields: creative URL, format (text, image, video), first and last shown dates, advertiser ID and domain. SerpApi costs eight times as much and was half a second slower.
- Search by domain, not by name. The advertiser lookup found nothing for “Grammarly” and three separate entities for “HubSpot” (HubSpot, Hubspot, Inc. and HubSpot, Inc. with 200, 3,000 and 20 ads). The domain key sidesteps that: both ad routes accept the advertiser’s domain and returned ads for all ten.
- No copy, no status, no spend. The Center shows a rendered creative and dates. There is no ad text field, no active flag (infer it from the last shown date), and no spend or impressions for commercial ads. The routes cannot return what the Center does not display.
- Library size is the useful extra. Both routes return Google’s estimate of how many ads the advertiser has in the Center: 4,000 for HubSpot, 17 for Notion, 80,000 for Shopify. For a monitoring job that is the number to watch week over week.
Who each route fits
- Weekly monitoring by domain: ScrapeCreators, $0.0019 a page, one second. Paginate with the cursor for advertisers with more than forty ads.
- You already have a SerpApi plan: its route is identical data; keep using it.
- EEA advertisers and you need targeting and recipients: Google’s EEA API under the Center’s terms, if you can obtain access; no third-party route here returned those fields.
- One credential across platforms: Treg routes both providers above with a receipt per call; see choose an API.
What this page cannot tell you
Ten domains, first page each. Whether Google’s EEA API is obtainable for a commercial research use, and on what terms, is not stated on the pages we could read; a per-ad format or surface breakdown across the whole Center was not measured. The Center’s terms page renders only in a browser and could not be quoted.
Next step
- Google’s description of the Center and its EEA API: support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/13733850.
- Through Treg: the docs list the ScrapeCreators Google ad-library endpoints and SerpApi’s Transparency Center route with current prices.
- Direct: ScrapeCreators, SerpApi Google Ads Transparency Center API.
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