LinkedIn Ads Library: How to Research Competitor Ads

Nearly every kickoff call we run arrives at the same question, usually from the CEO, usually about ten minutes in. "What are our competitors actually doing on LinkedIn?" Fair question. For years the honest answer was that nobody knew. You could read a rival's posts if you followed them. Their paid campaigns stayed invisible unless one happened to drift into your own feed.

That has changed. LinkedIn now publishes a free, public record of the ads running on its platform, and most B2B teams still have not opened it.

I'm Louise Perrin, Executive Assistant at Moriah, a LinkedIn agency and a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner. When our team assembles the competitive picture that sits underneath a client's campaign plan, the LinkedIn Ads Library is where we start. This guide covers what the tool is, how to search it properly, what it shows you, what it holds back on purpose, and how to turn an afternoon of clicking through competitor creative into decisions you can act on.

What the LinkedIn Ads Library Is

The LinkedIn Ads Library is a public, searchable database of advertising that has run on LinkedIn. It sits at linkedin.com/ad-library, it costs nothing, and you don't need a Campaign Manager account or an advertising budget to use it.

It exists for transparency reasons rather than marketing ones. Regulators across several markets now require large platforms to disclose who is paying for advertising and, in the European Union, who those ads were pointed at. LinkedIn built the library to meet those obligations. The useful side effect for B2B marketers is a permanent, no-cost window into how every serious advertiser in your category positions itself.

A few boundaries worth knowing before you start:

• The library covers ads that ran on LinkedIn after June 1, 2023. Anything older simply isn't there.
• An ad remains in the library for one year after its last impression. Paused and finished campaigns stay visible through that window, which is what makes historical pattern-reading possible at all.
• A live ad usually turns up shortly after it receives its first impression, so what you're looking at is close to current.
• Where an ad is restricted for legal reasons, LinkedIn withholds the preview, the advertiser name, and the payer name.

That one-year retention is the detail most people skip past. You aren't looking at a snapshot of today. You're looking at roughly twelve months of a competitor's paid activity, which is long enough to read a strategy rather than a single campaign.

How to Use the LinkedIn Ad Library, Step by Step

The interface is simple to the point of feeling sparse. The discipline sits in how you search, not where you click.

1. Open the library and search by advertiser

Go to linkedin.com/ad-library and type in the company name. You can search by company or advertiser name, and separately by payer name, meaning the entity that funded the ad. Those two aren't always the same. A holding company, a regional subsidiary, or an agency may be the payer sitting behind a brand page, and searching the payer name sometimes surfaces campaigns you'd otherwise never see.

Start with the obvious rivals. Then widen it out: the adjacent players, the systems integrators in your category, any company whose buyers overlap with yours.

2. Search by keyword, not just by company

Most people stop before this step, which is a shame, because it's the more valuable search. The keyword field looks inside the text of the ads themselves. Enter the language your buyers use, or the problem you solve, or the category term you compete on, and out comes every advertiser paying to own that phrase. Including companies you'd never have listed as competition.

If you sell logistics software, searching your rivals one at a time hands you back a list you already had. Searching "supply chain visibility" shows you the auction you're actually bidding into.

3. Filter by country and date range

Two further filters narrow the results: country and date range. Country matters more than it sounds like it should. A company might run an aggressive lead-generation program in one market and nothing whatsoever in another, and if you're weighing up an international expansion, that gap is more or less the entire answer to whether the market is contested.

Date range turns the library into a timeline. Filter to the last quarter, then the quarter before it, and compare. A competitor who ran twelve ads in spring and two in summer has either found something that works or run out of budget, and the creative usually tells you which.

4. Open the ad details

Every result has a details view. It shows the ad preview, the ad format, the advertiser name, the payer name, and whether the ad is restricted. For ads targeted at the European Union, LinkedIn shows a good deal more, which we get to below.

5. Record what you find

There's no export button and no bulk download. If you want a competitive picture you can put in front of people in a planning meeting, you'll have to build it yourself: a plain sheet with the advertiser, the date, the format, the offer, the headline, and the landing page. Twenty rows across six competitors is enough to see the pattern, and it takes about an hour.

What the LinkedIn Ads Library Shows You

Globally, for any ad in the library, you get:

• The ad creative and its format, whether that's a single image, a video, a carousel, a document ad, or a message ad
• The headline and body copy carried inside that preview
• The advertiser and the payer
• Whether the ad is restricted, in which case LinkedIn withholds the preview and both names

Notice what isn't on that list. Run dates, impressions, and targeting are disclosures LinkedIn publishes for the European Union, not fields you get on every listing. You can still narrow any search by country and date range. You just can't count on the listing itself telling you when an ad ran unless it was aimed at the EU.

For ads targeted at the European Union, transparency rules oblige LinkedIn to publish more, and that extra layer is genuinely useful:

• An estimate of the ad's total impressions, shown as a range rather than an exact count
• A breakdown of impressions by country, rounded to the nearest percent, with anything under one percent shown as <1%
• Up to three targeting parameters the advertiser applied, drawn from categories such as job targeting, company targeting, location targeting and audience targeting. An advertiser may well have used more than three; only the top ones get published.
• The dates the ad ran

If any part of your market touches the EU, this changes the exercise. There's a good deal less guessing about who a competitor is talking to. You can see that they went after operations directors in manufacturing rather than the C-suite, and then decide whether that's a gap you should occupy or a mistake you'd rather not repeat. It's still a partial view, though. Only the top parameters appear, so a campaign built on a long list of criteria shows you the headline of the targeting and not much else.

Treat the numbers as directional too. Impressions come as an estimated range, country percentages are rounded, and impressions can register outside a targeted country because people travel and profile locations go stale.

What the LinkedIn Ads Library Does Not Show

This is the part that keeps the tool honest, and it's why ad-library research should inform your plan rather than write it.

The library does not show spend. It does not show click-through rate, conversions, cost per lead, or any engagement metric at all. Outside the EU, it doesn't show targeting. And there's no public API or bulk export, so none of this scales into an automated dashboard.

Which leads to the practical consequence: you can see what your competitors are saying, but not whether it works. A rival's slickest, most frequent campaign may be their least profitable one. Volume is not validation. Every so often a company runs the same ad for nine months because nobody is measuring it.

So resist the strongest temptation the library creates, which is to copy whoever appears to be running the most. What you're gathering is intelligence about positioning, offers, and market coverage. Worth a great deal. Just not a performance report.

What to Actually Look For in a Competitor's Ads

Once twenty or thirty ads are sitting in front of you, here's the reading order we use.

The offer. Not the creative, the offer. Are they asking for a demo, a call, a report download, a webinar registration, a free trial? The offer tells you where they think their buyers sit in the cycle, and whether they're chasing pipeline now or building a list for later.

The angle. Every ad makes an argument about why the reader has a problem. Group the ads by argument and the two or three positions your category is being fought over start to show themselves. If four competitors all lead with cost reduction, cost reduction is crowded, and the interesting ground is somewhere else.

The format mix. Document ads, video, single image, and message ads cost differently and behave differently. A competitor leaning hard on document ads is running a content-led program. One leaning on message ads is running direct response. The mix tells you the strategy.

The cadence. Use the date filter. Consistent year-round advertising signals a committed budget and a team that has proved the channel internally. Bursts around events or launches signal something more opportunistic.

Where the click goes. Follow the ads to their destination. The landing page is often more instructive than the ad, since it carries the full argument, the proof points, and the form fields, which is to say exactly what they consider a qualified lead.

Who is missing. The absence is a finding. If your three largest competitors run no LinkedIn Ads at all, either the channel doesn't work for your category or nobody has tested it properly and the space is sitting open. Both are worth knowing before you commit a budget.

Five Uses for the Ads Library Beyond Competitor Research

Competitive intelligence is the obvious use. These are the ones that earn their keep.

1. Audit your own advertising. Search your own company. You'll see every ad currently running under your name, including campaigns a regional team or a previous agency launched and then forgot about. We've found live ads pointing at dead landing pages more than once.
2. Check an agency before you hire them. Search the agency itself, then search their named clients. An agency that sells LinkedIn Ads and has never run one is a reasonable thing to notice.
3. Sanity-check a new market. Filter by country before you enter one. A market thick with advertisers needs a different plan and a different budget from a quiet one.
4. Build a creative reference file. Search a keyword you compete on and save whatever stops you scrolling. It briefs a designer faster than any written description.
5. Study formats you haven't tried. Never run a document ad? Look at forty of them before you build one. The library is the largest free collection of real B2B creative anyone has.

Where Ad Research Stops and Strategy Starts

There's a pattern I see often enough to give it a name. A company spends a week in the ads library, builds a careful competitive deck, launches campaigns modeled on the best of what it found, and the campaigns underperform anyway. The research was sound. The conclusion drawn from it was too narrow.

The reason: what shows up in the library is one visible layer of a competitor's LinkedIn presence, and usually not the layer doing the work. You can't see their executives' posts, their outreach, or the relationships built up over the previous eighteen months. An ad from a company whose founder publishes weekly, whose sales team is already in conversation with the buyer, performs very differently from an identical ad run by a company nobody has heard of. Same creative. Different ground to land on.

Which is why LinkedIn Ads are one focus area out of three at Moriah, never a service you buy on its own. We run executive personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads together, in parallel, pointed at a single business objective, because that's how LinkedIn actually performs. Content published from a personal profile performs roughly 5 to 10 times better than the same content from a company page, and an ad reaching someone who already recognizes the name behind it is a different proposition from a cold impression. For any objective beyond pure awareness, the three pillars are required together.

So use the ads library for what it's genuinely excellent at. It will tell you what your market is arguing about, which offers your category leads with, where the competition is thin, and what good creative looks like in your sector. Then build a plan that includes the two pillars the library can't show you.

If you'd like a read on what your competitors are running, and on what your own LinkedIn presence should look like against it, book a call with our team.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the LinkedIn Ads Library? The LinkedIn Ads Library is a free, public database of advertising that has run on LinkedIn, available at linkedin.com/ad-library. Anyone can search ads by advertiser, payer, keyword, country, and date range, then view the creative, copy, and format of each one.

Is the LinkedIn Ad Library free to use? Yes. It's a public transparency tool, so no Campaign Manager account and no advertising budget are needed to search it. There's no paid tier and no usage limit.

How do I find a specific company's ads on LinkedIn? Open linkedin.com/ad-library and put the company name into the advertiser search. If nothing comes back, try the payer name instead, since campaigns are sometimes funded by a parent company, a subsidiary, or an agency rather than by the brand page itself.

How far back does the LinkedIn Ads Library go? It covers ads that ran on LinkedIn after June 1, 2023. Individual ads stay in the library for one year after their last impression, so at any given moment you're seeing roughly the past twelve months of a company's activity.

Does the LinkedIn Ad Library show how much competitors spend? No. Spend isn't disclosed anywhere in the library, and neither are click-through rates, conversions, or any other performance metric. For ads targeted at the European Union you can see an estimated impressions range, which is the closest available proxy for scale.

Can competitors see my LinkedIn Ads? Yes. Ads that run on LinkedIn show up in the library, with the preview and the advertiser and payer names withheld only for ads restricted on legal grounds. Assume your campaigns are visible to anyone who cares to look, and plan your creative and your offers on the basis that competitors will read them.

Why can't I find a company's ads in the library? The likeliest explanation is that they aren't advertising on LinkedIn, or haven't since June 1, 2023. Other possibilities: their last ad ran more than a year ago, the campaign is funded under a different payer name, or your country filter excludes the markets they run in.

Does the LinkedIn Ads Library show who an ad was targeted at? Only for ads targeted at the European Union, where transparency rules require it. Those listings show up to three of the targeting parameters the advertiser applied, from categories such as job, company and location targeting, plus an impressions breakdown by country. Outside the EU, targeting isn't published.

Can I export or download ads from the LinkedIn Ad Library? There's no export function, no bulk download, and no public API. If you want a record you can analyze, you build it manually, which in practice means a spreadsheet capturing the advertiser, date, format, offer, headline, and landing page.

How often should I check the LinkedIn Ads Library? Once a quarter covers it for most B2B companies. Check it before planning a campaign, before entering a new market, and after a competitor makes a visible move such as a launch or a funding announcement.