LinkedIn Ad Library search — every B2B ad they run

What the LinkedIn Ad Library is

The LinkedIn Ad Library is a public, searchable record of the ads that have run on LinkedIn. It sits inside LinkedIn's Transparency Center, it needs no account, and it covers advertising worldwide rather than one region.

For B2B marketers it is the most under-used research tool on this list. LinkedIn is where competitors spend their expensive money — the demand-gen budget, the ABM programme, the whitepaper machine — and every piece of it is visible here to anyone who thinks to look. Most people do not.

The archive starts on 1 June 2023. Ads appear shortly after their first impression and stay in the library for one year after their last impression, which means a campaign that ended eleven months ago is still readable and one that ended thirteen months ago is not.

Three different searches, three different answers

The search form offers company or advertiser, payer, and keyword, and they are not variations on one query. Choosing the right one is most of the skill.

The payer field is the one nobody uses and the one that repays curiosity. It names the entity that paid for the ads, which is not always the company in the creative. A media agency in the payer field tells you the account is outsourced. A parent company tells you the budget is centralised. Searching by payer surfaces every brand a single buyer is running, which on a holding company can be a map of an entire portfolio's demand-gen strategy.

Keyword search matches the words inside the ads themselves, which makes it a category tool rather than a competitor tool. Search the phrase your market argues about and you get everyone currently paying to own it, including competitors you had not thought of.

Two things surprise people on their first real search, and both are worth knowing before you conclude the tool is broken. The first is that the company field matches loosely: search Canva and the results also contain Canvas Forum, Canvas Homes and Canvas Worldwide, none of which are the company you meant. Read the advertiser name on each card rather than trusting the query.

The second is how thin a single company's live results are. Search Salesforce, HubSpot, Datadog, ServiceNow or Snowflake and you will typically get a handful of ads each, not the hundreds their budgets imply — the library shows what is live and de-duplicated, not every creative ever bought. Keyword search is where the volume lives: a broad term like marketing returns hundreds of ads across the market on the same afternoon that CRM returns single figures. If you want breadth, search the category; if you want a named competitor, expect a short list and read it properly.

• Company or advertiser — everything one LinkedIn Page is running. The starting point for a named competitor.
• Payer — everything one paying entity is running, across brands. Reveals agencies and parent companies.
• Keyword — everyone buying attention on a phrase, across the whole market.
• Country and date range narrow any of the three; both filter what was served, not what was targeted.

What you see on each ad

Every entry carries the ad preview, the format, the advertiser name and the payer name. That combination is enough to read a competitor's positioning in an afternoon: the formats tell you whether they are running document ads, video, single-image or conversation-style placements, and the creatives tell you which pain they have decided their market feels.

Ads targeted at the European Union carry considerably more. LinkedIn publishes impression data, the targeting parameters chosen, and the dates the ad ran, and the search form exposes matching filters for impression range and targeting that simply do not apply elsewhere. If your competitor advertises into Europe, run your research with a European country selected and you get a materially richer file.

Restricted ads are the visible gap. Where regulation requires it, LinkedIn withholds the preview, the advertiser name and the payer name, and shows the entry as restricted instead.

What it does not give you

No spend, anywhere. The EU impression data is the only quantitative signal in the tool, and it is a range rather than a number. A competitor's LinkedIn budget is not published in any form.

No export from the page itself. There is an official Ad Library API, which makes LinkedIn the one platform here that offers a sanctioned programmatic route — but it is not something you can casually script: it needs a LinkedIn developer application with the Ad Library product enabled and an authenticated member token, and it returns metadata rather than the creative image. In the browser, where nearly everyone actually works, there is no download button.

And no memory beyond its own rolling window. Ads leave the library a year after their last impression, silently. If a campaign matters to your analysis, the responsibility for keeping a copy is yours, and a screenshot in a Slack thread is not a record.

How to use it well

The pattern that works is periodic and comparative. Pick the four or five competitors who actually take deals off you, search each by company, and record what you find — formats, offers, the specific words they use for the problem. A month later, do it again and read the difference.

The difference is the whole point. A competitor swapping from webinar registrations to a product-led trial offer has changed their funnel, not their creative. A sudden run of document ads means they built an asset and need it read. New job-title language in the copy means they have moved up or down market. None of that is visible in a single visit, and all of it is obvious across two.

The catch is that doing it by hand, on schedule, across five competitors, is a recurring chore that quietly stops happening around week four.