LinkedIn Ad Library: how to see any company's ads (and what to look for)

LinkedIn’s Ad Library is the easiest competitor research most B2B marketers don’t do. It’s public, it’s free and it shows the actual ads a company is paying to put in front of its buyers. What it doesn’t do is compare anything: you open ads one by one and keep notes yourself. This guide covers both halves, using it well and turning it into a comparison in a few minutes.

What the Ad Library shows

From LinkedIn’s help page and our own searches:

• Every ad: the ad preview and copy, its format (single image, video, document, message ad and others), the advertiser, who paid for it, the button and the landing page.
• Ads shown in the EU also get the dates they ran, an impression range and the targeting, because the EU’s Digital Services Act requires it.
• Coverage: ads that ran on LinkedIn after 1 June 2023. Each ad stays for a year after its last impression, and new ads appear shortly after their first.
• Search by company or advertiser name, payer, keyword, country and date range.

Two real searches, 31 October 2026

Sprout Social, last 30 days

LinkedIn listed 158 Sprout Social ads in total. The first page of the last 30 days had 24, and almost all of them pushed one thing: Sprout’s free virtual Social Intelligence Summit on 29 October.

• One event, many angles. Separate ads sold the keynote speaker, a panel (“This might be the most anticipated panel of the summit”), and a session on trust: “Audiences trust the advocates they already follow, often more than they trust a brand handle alone.”
• Speakers’ own words as ads. Several ads are first-person posts by speakers (“I’m delivering the opening keynote…”, “Can’t wait for this one! I’m hosting…”), promoted by Sprout. The people on stage do the selling.
• The same copy, many times. “Don’t miss your chance to lead the conversation” appears as at least three separate ads (1, 2, 3), as do several other headlines. When the words stay the same, the test is usually the image or the audience.
• One product campaign alongside. A guide on executive presence ran with a data hook: “Four out of five LinkedIn users drive business decisions, with twice the buying power of the average web audience.”

HubSpot in Germany, France and the Netherlands, last 30 days

Narrowing to EU countries adds the numbers. Of the first 24 ads:

What that tells a competitor:

• Broad ads for reach, messages for a short list. The workshop ad and the CRM video reached hundreds of thousands, while the message ads (“Hi %FIRSTNAME%, I just finished writing Loop…”) each reached under a thousand people: a hand-picked list of marketing leaders, offered a signed copy or a 1:1 session.
• A switching offer, in German. “Deine Systeme kosten Zeit und Nerven?” invites teams thinking about moving to HubSpot to a live demo. Local-language ads with a concrete offer, not translated brand slogans.
• Landing-page links give away the plan. The CRM video’s link carries a campaign name that includes “VideoViews”, “Q4-2026” and “Downmarket-Founder”: the objective, the quarter and the audience, in plain sight.
• Partners appear too. A search for “HubSpot” also returned ads by HubSpot partners (IXTENSA offering a free HubSpot audit, ROI Digital). Check the advertiser line before you draw conclusions.

What to look for in a competitor’s ads

A checklist for each competitor, which takes ten minutes once the ads are in front of you:

COMPETITOR:
ADS IN THE LAST 30 DAYS:
WHAT THEY'RE PROMOTING:      (product, event, content, hiring)
FORMATS:                     (image, video, document, message, thought leader)
OFFERS AND BUTTONS:          (demo, trial, guide, event, "Learn more")
HOOKS:                       (first line of each distinct ad)
REPEATED COPY:               (same words in several ads = what they're testing)
LANDING PAGES:               (and any campaign names in the links)
EU ONLY - RUN DATES:
EU ONLY - IMPRESSION RANGE:  (which ads they push hardest)
EU ONLY - TARGETING:
WHAT WE COULD DO DIFFERENTLY:

Two tips:

• Ads that run longest are the winners. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that doesn’t work. In the EU data, sort by how long each ad has been running.
• Read their organic posts too. Ads show what a company wants to say; its posts and their comments show what its audience responds to. The LinkedIn teardown recipe puts both side by side.

Let your AI do the comparison

With Scrollhound connected, Claude or ChatGPT reads the Ad Library for you and fills in the checklist:

Use Scrollhound to pull <Company>'s LinkedIn ads from the last 30 days (also search the EU,
countries DE,FR,NL, for dates and impressions). Group them by what they promote, list the formats,
offers and hooks, flag copy that repeats across ads, and fill in this checklist: <paste it>.
Link every ad you mention.

Run it for three competitors and ask for one comparison table at the end. For their other platforms, the competitor analysis template covers TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X, and X advanced search shows how to read what their customers say to them.

Where another tool is better: LinkedIn’s library only covers LinkedIn. For Facebook and Instagram ads use Meta’s free Ad Library, and for search and YouTube ads Google’s Ads Transparency Center.

Set it up

Add Scrollhound to Claude or ChatGPT as a connector, sign in with your email, and paste the prompt with your competitor’s name. New accounts get 100 free reads, no card needed.