What is the Meta Ad Library?

The Meta Ad Library is Meta's public record of advertising on its apps. Meta's Business Help Centre says it contains all active ads shown across Meta technologies, plus active branded content on Facebook and Instagram that carries a paid partnership label. Anyone can view and search it. A search for a word, name or Page returns ads that contain the term and ads run by Pages whose names include it.

The library began as the Ad Archive, a record of political and issue ads in the US. In March 2019 Meta opened it to all active ads from every Page, to make advertising more transparent and give people more information about the ads they see. Part of it is now a legal duty. Article 39 of the EU Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to keep a searchable public repository of their ads, with API access, for as long as each ad runs and for one year after it last appears.

Each search result is a card for one ad. For an ordinary commercial ad, the card and its details page show:

• The creative and the copy, with a note when the ad runs in several versions.

• The Page that ran it, with context such as when the Page was created and its past names.

• A Library ID and the date the ad started running.

• The platforms it runs on, such as Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

• A count when several ads use the same creative and text.

• Extra details behind See ad details, such as the advertiser's About section or information about a lead form.

Ads with age-restricted content, such as alcohol or gambling, hide their creative from people who are under age or not logged in. The website can sort results by impressions, high to low, or by most recent, but it never prints the impression count for an ordinary ad.

Two groups of ads carry far more information. Ads about social issues, elections or politics need a disclaimer naming who paid for them. Their details page shows ranges for impressions and spend, the share of viewers by age, gender and location, the estimated audience size, and the contact details given in the disclaimer. Meta keeps these ads for seven years, whether or not they still run.

Meta archives ads that deliver an impression in the EU or associated territories to meet the Digital Services Act. Meta treats UK ads the same way, as part of what it calls a commitment to expand transparency there. For these ads the library shows the dates they ran, the age, gender and location targeting the advertiser chose, total reach in those regions, and reach broken down by location, age and gender. EU ads also name the advertiser and the payer. They stay for one year after their last impression.

If Meta rejects or disables an EU, UK or political ad after it has run, the library keeps the record and places a shield over the creative.

For an ordinary commercial ad, the library shows what people saw, not how it performed. It gives no spend, no impression count, no reach outside the EU and UK, and no clicks, click-through rate, conversions, cost per result or return on ad spend. The Ad Library API confirms the split. Its spend and impressions fields return data only for ads about social issues, elections or politics.

History is limited too. An ordinary ad that never delivered in the EU or UK leaves the library when it stops, so you see what an advertiser runs today, not the ads it switched off. Even the EU and UK data stops at reach and targeting. No ad type shows sales.

Advertisers fill the gap with inference. An ad that has run for months, or a concept a brand has copied into many versions, is probably paying for itself, because advertisers tend to switch off ads that lose money. Meta does not confirm this. It is a practitioner rule of thumb and the usual working definition of a winning ad. A start date also says nothing about how much budget sits behind an ad today.

The Ad Library API lets developers query the library in code. It covers ads about social issues, elections or politics delivered anywhere in the past seven years, and ads of any type delivered to the UK or EU in the past year. Access takes three steps. You confirm your identity and location through the process Meta uses for political advertisers, which can take a few days, then create a Meta for Developers account and an app. The API has firm limits:

• Ordinary commercial ads that ran only outside the UK and EU are out of reach. The website is the only way to browse them.

• Spend and impressions come back as ranges, and only for political and issue ads.

• EU and UK reach and demographic figures are estimates, built partly from the age and gender people give in their profiles.

• A search string can be at most 100 characters long.

The Ad Library Report is a separate, downloadable summary of ads about social issues, elections or politics, including spend, for one country over a chosen period. It covers only that category, in the countries where those ads need authorisation.

For brands, the library is the only free view of what competitors run on Meta right now. Common uses are checking which offers and formats a rival is testing, counting how many versions of one concept it runs, collecting examples for a swipe file, and confirming that your own ads appear under the right Page. The step-by-step guide to searching the Ad Library covers filters and search types.

Seeing an ad does not make it free to reuse. The ads in the library belong to the advertisers that made them, and what you can take from a competitor's ad depends on copyright, trade mark law and Meta's intellectual property rules.