Facebook Ad Library API: Search Ads and Competitor Creative

The Facebook Ad Library is Meta’s public database of ads running across its products. An Ad Library API makes that data usable in competitor monitoring, creative research, compliance review, and campaign analysis workflows.

CreatorCrawl exposes five Meta Ad Library tasks through REST:

Task	Endpoint
Search companies	GET /api/facebook/adLibrary/search/companies
Search ads	GET /api/facebook/adLibrary/search/ads
Get company ads	GET /api/facebook/adLibrary/company/ads
Get one ad	GET /api/facebook/adLibrary/ad
Transcribe a video ad	GET /api/facebook/adLibrary/ad/transcript

The official Meta Ad Library API remains the right source when its access model and documented archive scope fit your application. CreatorCrawl provides a single-key read path alongside its other public social-data endpoints.

Search Meta ads by keyword

curl "https://app.creatorcrawl.com/api/facebook/adLibrary/search/ads?query=running%20shoes&country=US&status=ACTIVE&media_type=VIDEO" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Filters include:

• Keyword or exact-phrase matching
• Country and language
• Active, inactive, or all ads
• Image, video, meme, mixed, or no-media formats
• Start and end dates
• Impression or recent sorting
• Cursor pagination
• Trimmed responses for smaller payloads

Use the POST version of the same endpoint when a pagination cursor grows too large for a practical query string.

curl -X POST "https://app.creatorcrawl.com/api/facebook/adLibrary/search/ads" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"running shoes","country":"US","status":"ACTIVE","cursor":"LONG_CURSOR"}'

Find a company’s page ID

Company-specific lookup is more precise than a general keyword search. Resolve the advertiser first:

curl "https://app.creatorcrawl.com/api/facebook/adLibrary/search/companies?query=nike" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Then request its ads with either pageId or companyName:

curl "https://app.creatorcrawl.com/api/facebook/adLibrary/company/ads?pageId=PAGE_ID&country=US&status=ACTIVE" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Retrieve creative detail

The single-ad endpoint accepts an Ad Library ID or URL. Responses can include advertiser, active status, run dates, body text, images, videos, display format, destination URL, call to action, and available delivery data.

curl "https://app.creatorcrawl.com/api/facebook/adLibrary/ad?id=AD_ID&trim=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

For public video ads, request a transcript:

curl "https://app.creatorcrawl.com/api/facebook/adLibrary/ad/transcript?id=AD_ID" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

The upstream uses published captions when available and otherwise attempts to transcribe the public video. Ads without a video or available transcript return no transcript.

Build a competitor creative monitor

1. Resolve each competitor’s Ad Library page ID.
2. Request active company ads on a schedule.
3. Deduplicate by ad archive ID.
4. Store first-seen and last-seen timestamps.
5. Extract body text, headline, CTA, destination, images, and video metadata.
6. Transcribe only new video creatives.
7. Alert when a new concept, offer, landing page, or format appears.

This produces a useful creative history without pretending that an ad’s presence proves spend, performance, or targeting. Public delivery fields vary by ad category and region.

Research questions the data can answer

• Which hooks and offers recur across a competitor’s active ads?
• How often does the advertiser rotate creative?
• Which landing pages and CTAs appear most often?
• Does the mix lean toward video, static image, or multi-card formats?
• Which claims or product categories are new this month?
• What language appears in video ads but not in the visible primary text?

See the Facebook API hub for the complete public-data surface and the Facebook scraper guide for page, post, group, and comment examples. Create an API key to start with free credits.