How to use the LinkedIn Ad Library for competitor research

What does the LinkedIn Ad Library show about a competitor's ads?

For most ads, the ad itself and who is behind it. Ads targeted to the European Union carry more, because the law requires it.¹²

The library covers ads that ran after June 1, 2023, keeps each ad for one year after its last impression, and usually shows a new ad shortly after its first impression. For restricted ads, LinkedIn hides the preview, the advertiser name and the payer name.¹

How do I use the LinkedIn Ad Library to see what ads my competitors are running?

Six steps, using the labels on the page. We checked them in the library on 2026-11-05.⁴

1. Open the Ad Library

   Go to linkedin.com/ad-library. We could search it without signing in.

2. Search by the competitor's company name

   The search form has Company or advertiser, Payer, Keyword, Country and Date fields.¹ Type the competitor's name in Company or advertiser and search. The results page gives a count ("ads match your search criteria") and sorts newest to oldest.

3. Look for posts from its people

   In the results, a post from someone's own profile that the company paid for shows the person's name and headline and "Promoted by" the company, where a company-page ad says "Promoted". Search by Payer to find ads a company paid for.¹

4. Open View details

   The ad page shows the full copy and creative, then About the ad: the format (for example, Video Ad), the advertiser and "Paid for by" with the paying entity. LinkedIn notes that an ad may have multiple versions.

5. Use More for EU-targeted ads

   For ads targeted to the European Union, the More button lets you search by impression range and targeting parameters, and the ad page shows impressions, targeting and the dates the ad ran.¹

6. Record what you find, with the date

   Outside the EU, ads show no run dates, so note the date you first saw each one. Without that, you can't tell a new campaign from an old one later. Ads leave the library one year after their last impression.¹

Does the library show thought leader ads from a competitor's employees?

Yes. LinkedIn lets a company pay to promote a post from a person's own profile, and those posts appear in the Ad Library under the company that paid. In HubSpot's results on 2026-11-05, for example, posts from individual people carried "Promoted by HubSpot".⁴ The help page lists both an advertiser name and a payer name for each ad, and the search has a Payer field.¹

For a B2B competitor these posts are worth reading closely. They show which people the company puts in front of buyers, such as founders, sales leaders or customers, and the first-person stories it is willing to pay for. Hopkin's LinkedIn tracking includes them: linkedin_ads_list_competitor_ads marks each ad attribution: "advertiser" for the company page or "payer" for an employee post, with posted_by naming the person.⁶

What can't the LinkedIn Ad Library show?

• Spend: LinkedIn's help pages list no spend figure for any ad.¹²
• Impressions, targeting and run dates outside the EU: these appear only for ads targeted to the European Union.¹ Even then, LinkedIn notes that impressions can register in countries outside those targeted, for example when members travel.²
• Results: clicks, leads and cost per lead are not in LinkedIn's list of what the library shows, for any ad.¹
• Restricted ads: the preview, advertiser name and payer name are hidden.¹
• Older history: nothing that ran before June 1, 2023, and nothing more than a year past its last impression.¹

LinkedIn also runs an Ad Library API. It is a vetted product you request through a developer app, its results add impressions, targeting and dates for ads targeted to the EU and Brazil, and LinkedIn says it is "intended to support ad transparency for research and non-commercial use cases", with a rate limit.³

How do I track competitor ads on LinkedIn for a B2B SaaS company?

Pick a short list, check it on a fixed day, and log the same fields every time. This routine is ours, not LinkedIn's.

• Who to track: your three to five closest competitors, one or two larger players your buyers compare you with, and any newcomer showing up in your deals.
• When: weekly is enough for most teams. The results sort newest to oldest, so you read from the top until you reach ads you have already logged.⁴
• What to log: the date you saw it, the advertiser or the person who posted it, the format, the first line of copy, the offer and the landing page.
• What to look for: a new offer or a new format, an employee who starts appearing in paid posts, and a message that keeps coming back.

To skip the manual log, Hopkin, our product, tracks your competitors' Meta and LinkedIn ads and refreshes them daily. See how it works below.

How do I analyze competitor ad creative: hooks, formats and offers?

Break each ad into the same five parts, then compare across ads. The framework is ours, and it works for Meta ads too.

LinkedIn's own format names, as Hopkin records them from the library, include sponsored_status_update (a single-image post), sponsored_video, sponsored_update_native_document, sponsored_update_linkedin_article, sponsored_update_event and sponsored_message.⁶ Once a few weeks are logged, count by format and offer for each competitor. Those counts are ads seen, not spend: a brand can put most of its budget behind one ad.

To turn this into a creative brief, pick the two or three patterns you want to answer, say which you will copy, which you will counter and which you will skip, and write one test for each. Keep a link to the source ads in the brief so the team can check the reasoning.

Can an AI assistant research competitors' LinkedIn ads for you?

Yes, if it can read ad-library data. You can paste ads in by hand, or connect an MCP server. Hopkin, our product, tracks your competitors' Meta and LinkedIn ads and refreshes them daily. On LinkedIn it collects ads from the public Ad Library for the advertisers you track and serves them to Claude or ChatGPT. Its docs describe these tools:

• linkedin_ads_track_competitor adds an advertiser to daily tracking, covering its company-page ads and the employee posts it pays for. An organization ID is exact; a name has to match the company's LinkedIn page, and several matches return a list of candidates and track nothing. It needs no LinkedIn connection.⁵
• linkedin_ads_list_competitor_ads lists a tracked advertiser's ads with copy, call to action, landing URL and media details. It filters by active ads, format, when an ad first appeared and full-text search over the copy.⁶
• linkedin_ads_get_competitor_ad opens one ad in full, with its media and links to frames from any video.⁹
• linkedin_ads_search_ad_library searches by keyword, by advertiser name or by up to 10 organization IDs.⁷
• linkedin_ads_list_tracked_competitors shows who you track, how many ads each has, how many of those are employee posts, and flags an advertiser as stale after 48 hours without a successful scrape.⁸

For ads delivered in the EU, Hopkin's raw data can include the payer, an impression range, impressions by country and targeting, as LinkedIn shows them.⁶ Questions you can ask once a competitor is tracked:

• "Which offers has this competitor pushed on LinkedIn this quarter, and in which formats?"
• "Which of its employees appear in paid posts, and what does each one talk about?"
• "Break its active ads into hook, format, offer, proof and messenger."
• "Write a creative brief for three tests that answer its strongest message."

Hopkin's tool layer is read-only: no tool creates, edits or deletes anything in an ad account. If you connect your own LinkedIn Ads account for reporting, the sign-in asks for LinkedIn's rw_ads scope, which can write; our guide to verifying a read-only ads MCP server explains what that means.¹¹ The competitor tools need no LinkedIn connection.⁵

Where Hopkin's LinkedIn tracking falls short

• The first scrape of a new advertiser is partial. Ask again after three to five minutes for the rest.
• Run dates can be empty until the scrape has read each ad's detail page, and the call to action and landing URL are often empty.
• A count of 47 or 48 ads may be a collection limit. Read it as 48 or more.
• Short or generic company names can match only lookalikes; use the organization ID for those.⁵
• Counts are ads seen, not spend. It covers LinkedIn and Meta only; for Meta, see our Meta Ad Library guide.

Which AI tools research competitor ads on both Meta and LinkedIn?

Few that we found say they cover LinkedIn. Prices are as published on 2026-11-05, monthly. We have not tested the other tools; the descriptions are from their own pages.

Our view: for B2B teams whose competitors spend on LinkedIn, check LinkedIn coverage first, because most spy tools are built around Meta. If you want the research inside Claude or ChatGPT next to your own LinkedIn, Google and Meta numbers, that is what Hopkin does. If you want boards and a swipe file, Foreplay does more.

Is this useful for e-commerce brands and agencies?

Less for most e-commerce brands, whose competitors usually spend more on Meta; start with our Meta Ad Library guide. Agencies with B2B clients can run the routine above per client. Hopkin's credits are pooled per organization and every plan has unlimited seats.¹⁰