Meta Ad Library (Facebook Ad Library): How to Use It in 2026

Meta renamed the Facebook Ad Library when Facebook became Meta, so "Facebook Ad Library", "Facebook Ads Library" and "Meta Ads Library" all mean the same tool at the same address.

The interface below is what the library showed when we checked it on 21 October 2026. Meta changes it from time to time, but the controls have been stable for a while.

1. Pick a country

The first dropdown sets which country's ads you see. Results only include ads delivered there, so set it to the market your competitor actually sells in. "All" is available, but it makes keyword searches much noisier.

2. Pick an ad category

The second dropdown has five options: All ads; Issues, elections or politics; Properties; Employment; and Financial products and services. For competitor research on a consumer brand, leave it on All ads.

3. Search by advertiser, not keyword

The search box says "Search by keyword or advertiser". As you type, it suggests advertiser Pages — pick the Page. A plain keyword search matches any ad containing the words, and the results get messy fast: a US keyword search for "liquid death" returned about 4,700 active ads on the day we checked, including supplement ads that only matched the word "liquid". Choosing the advertiser's Page gives you just their ads.

4. Narrow it with Filters

Once results load, the Filters button opens six controls:

• Language — useful for brands running the same campaign in several languages.
• Advertiser — narrows a keyword search down to specific Pages.
• Platform — Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger, WhatsApp or Threads.
• Media type — Images, Memes (images with text), Images and memes, Videos, or No image or video. On a keyword search, the Videos option matches your keyword in the video's transcript as well as the ad copy, which is a quick way to find every ad that says a phrase out loud.
• Active status — Active ads (the default), Inactive ads, or Active and inactive.
• Impressions by date — a date or date range, to see what was delivering during a launch or a sale.

5. Sort the results

Sort by offers Impressions: high to low and Most recent. Sorting by impressions puts the ads Meta is delivering most at the top — the closest thing the library gives you to a performance signal. Sorting by most recent shows what a brand is testing right now.

Every result is a card. Here is what each part means:

• Active / Inactive — whether the ad is currently delivering.
• Library ID — the ad's permanent ID. Save it if you want to find the exact ad again later.
• Started running on [date] — on active ads, the launch date. Inactive ads show a full date range instead, so you can see exactly how long they ran.
• Platforms — icons for where the ad is delivering.
• "N ads use this creative and text" — the same creative running as several ads, usually across ad sets or audiences. A creative a brand has duplicated is one it is putting weight behind.
• See ad details / See summary details — opens the full ad, every version of it, and any extra transparency data.
• EU transparency — appears on ads that delivered in the EU. Those ads carry extra detail: the dates the ad ran, the targeting parameters used (such as age, gender and location) and who was served the ad.
• "[Creator] with [Brand]" — a partnership ad, run through a creator's handle with the brand's permission.

Ads that broke Meta's advertising policies can still appear, with a warning before you view them, and some cards note that the advertiser's account was later disabled.

Most guides skip this part, but it decides how much you can learn from the library. For an ordinary commercial ad — the kind your competitors run — it does not show:

• Spend. Spend ranges are published only for ads about social issues, elections or politics.
• Impression or reach figures. You can sort by impressions, but the counts themselves aren't shown outside political ads and EU ads.
• Results. No CTR, conversions, CPA or ROAS. Nothing tells you whether an ad made money.
• Targeting, outside the EU. If an ad never delivered in the EU, you can't see who it was aimed at.
• A reliable history of stopped ads. Meta only commits to showing commercial ads while they're active. When we filtered for inactive ads, many of the results carried the EU transparency label — they are there because of the EU's one-year archive, not because Meta keeps everything.
• Why a brand made its choices. The library shows what is running. It doesn't group ads by hook, angle, emotional pitch or product, so the strategy behind them stays hidden until you work it out.

Without spend or results, you are reading proxies. These are the ones that hold up in practice:

• How long an ad has been running. Nobody keeps paying for a creative that loses money. An ad that has been live for 60–90 days or more is very likely profitable, or at least worth its spend. Short-lived ads are usually tests.
• Where it sits when sorted by impressions. The ads at the top are the ones Meta is spending most of the account's delivery on right now.
• How many times a creative is duplicated. "12 ads use this creative and text" means the brand is scaling it across audiences or campaigns.
• How many ads are active. A brand running hundreds of active ads has a real testing pipeline. One running a dozen is relying on a few proven ads.
• Format mix. Use the Media type filter to count images against videos. That tells you whether the category rewards a clean product shot or a story.
• Landing pages. Click through a sample of ads and note where they send people. The pages a brand pays to send traffic to are the products it is pushing.
• What gets said out loud. Filter a keyword search to Videos to find every ad that speaks a phrase — a competitor's tagline, a claim, an objection they handle.

All of this works, but it's slow: sampling a few hundred ads by hand to count formats or transcribe opening lines takes hours per brand. For a step-by-step research process built on these signals, see how to research competitor Facebook ads.

Search Meta's library for Liquid Death and you get a grid of cards: launch dates, platform icons, ad copy and the creatives themselves. Useful, but you'd have to open hundreds of cards to answer the questions that matter.

Here is the same brand on its GoMarble brand page, which classifies a sample of the ads rather than listing them. Figures are from the page's last update on 2 March 2026:

Three Meta tools have similar names, and people often search for one when they mean another:

• Meta Ad Library — this tool. Public, read-only, every advertiser's ads.
• Ads Manager's media library — the images and videos uploaded to your own ad account. Only you and your team see it.
• Meta Creative Hub — a workspace for building ad mockups and previews before they run. See our Creative Hub guide.

The library also links to two related tools at the top of the page: the Ad Library Report, a downloadable summary of political and social issue ad spending by country, and Branded Content, a separate search of paid partnership posts on Facebook and Instagram.

The Ad Library API lets developers query the library programmatically and filter by active status, date, country and more. It needs a Meta developer access token.

The important limit: according to Meta's API reference, ads that did not reach any location in the EU are only returned if they are about social issues, elections or politics. So for a US-only DTC brand, the API returns almost nothing commercial. It is built for researchers and political transparency, not for tracking competitors' ecommerce ads.