How do I find competitor Facebook ads? Meta Ad Library

The Meta Ad Library at facebook.com/ads/library is Meta's own transparency database, and it contains every ad currently running across Meta technologies, including Facebook and Instagram. Anyone can use it, you do not need an ad account or even a Facebook login. The walkthrough takes about a minute. Open the Ad Library, set the ad category to "All ads", and choose the country you care about, since results are shown per country and a Malaysian brand's ads will surface under Malaysia. Then type the competitor's Facebook Page name into the search bar and select their Page from the dropdown. You will see a grid of every ad that Page is running right now: the image or video, the primary text, the headline, the call to action, and the platforms where it appears. Each ad card also shows its status and the date it started running, and when a brand is testing variations you can open an ad to see the multiple versions it is running. You can also search by keyword instead of Page name, which is useful for scanning a whole niche, for example searching "tuition centre" or "skincare" under Malaysia. Filters let you narrow results by media type such as image or video and by date range, so you can isolate video ads launched in the last month or every ad live during a campaign period.

Because advertisers switch off ads that lose money, the start date is the single most useful field in the Library. An ad that has been running for a month or more is very likely profitable, while ten ads that all launched this week are a fresh test where the brand itself does not yet know the winner. Sort your attention accordingly: long-running ads reveal proven angles, offers, and formats, and recently launched batches reveal what the brand is experimenting with next. Look for patterns rather than single ads. If a competitor keeps returning to the same hook, the same before-and-after structure, or the same festive promo mechanic, that repetition is evidence the concept works. Note which formats dominate, static versus video versus carousel, and which platforms each ad targets, since a brand pushing everything to Instagram Reels placements is telling you where its audience responds.

The Library is a transparency tool, not an analytics tool, and its blind spots matter. For normal commercial ads it shows no spend, no reach or impressions, no click or conversion data, and no audience targeting. Meta only publishes spend ranges, reach, and funding entities for ads about social issues, elections, or politics, and those ads stay searchable for seven years. Regular ads simply disappear from the Library once they stop running, so there is no history to study: if a competitor's best ad ended last month, the Library will never show it to you. There is also no way to search across many brands at once, save ads into collections, or compare a category over time. You are browsing one Page or one keyword at a time, and every insight has to be inferred manually from run time and repetition.

Those gaps are why serious advertisers pair the Ad Library with an archive that keeps history and adds structure. AdPlay.ai maintains an archive of millions of Malaysian Meta ads across roughly 16,000 brands, so ads remain researchable after they stop running and you can filter across an entire industry instead of one Page at a time. That turns competitor research from screenshotting individual ads into questions like which hooks dominate Malaysian skincare right now, or what a category's ads looked like before last year's 11.11 push. The practical workflow: use the Meta Ad Library for a quick live check on a specific competitor, then use an archive for pattern research across a category, including ads that are no longer active. From there, AdPlay.ai's AdGPT assistant can help dissect why a long-running ad works and generate your own on-brand versions of the angle, grounded in your brand kit, ready to launch back to Facebook and Instagram. There is a 7-day free trial with no card required if you want to test the research side first.