How to see every ad a brand is running

Start with the brand name, not a keyword

Open Cross-Platform Search from the Tools menu, type the brand name, and hit search. You do not need the exact legal entity or the Facebook Page name — the brand as customers know it is enough.

The result is every ad that brand currently has in circulation on the platforms we cover, with the creative, the copy and how long each ad has been live.

Page to the end before you draw conclusions

This is the mistake that costs people the most, so it is worth saying plainly: the first page of results is not a sample of the brand’s advertising. Results come back ranked, and the top of a ranked list is survivor-biased — the ads that have been running longest and hardest float up.

We have measured this on our own data. On one brand, the top 80 ads suggested a median ad age of 16 days. The full 194 said seven. If you stop at page one you will systematically overestimate how long that brand’s creative survives, and you will copy the wrong things.

Load the whole set before you judge anything about longevity, volume or format mix.

Read the set, not the ad

One ad tells you almost nothing. The set tells you the strategy. Three things worth reading first:

• Volume. A brand running four ads is testing. A brand running four hundred has a creative engine and a budget behind it.
• Format mix. Mostly video means they are buying attention at the top of the funnel. Mostly static with heavy offer copy means they are closing.
• Age spread. A wide spread of launch dates means continuous testing. Everything launched on one day is a campaign, not a system.

Narrow by platform when the answer is platform-specific

Cross-Platform Search is the right default. Switch to Meta Ads Search, Google Ads Search or TikTok Ads when your question is genuinely about one channel — for example, "what is their YouTube pre-roll doing" or "are they on TikTok at all".

Each per-platform tool is scoped strictly to that platform, so a Meta search returns Meta and Instagram placements only. It will not quietly fold in results from elsewhere.