Facebook Ad Library API That Actually Works
No blocking. No maintenance. 99.9% uptime. Get reliable access to Facebook Ad Library data at scale while we handle the infrastructure.
See Real Data in Seconds
Paste any Facebook Ads Library URL below and watch us fetch the actual ad data. No signup required. Demo is limited to 20 ads per request — full API returns up to 100,000+.
// Results will appear here...This is just a preview. With a full API key, get up to 1,000+ ads per request with webhooks, historical data, and more.
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Simple Request, Rich Response
Send us your search criteria, get back structured ad data. No parsing, no cleaning, no headaches.
1{
2 "search_query": "shopify",
3 "country": "US",
4 "ad_type": "all",
5 "advertiser_id": "optional",
6 "date_range": {
7 "start": "2024-01-01",
8 "end": "2024-12-31"
9 },
10 "media_type": "all",
11 "max_results": 1000,
12 "include_inactive": true
13}1{
2 "total_count": 1000,
3 "page": 1,
4 "per_page": 1000,
5 "data": [
6 {
7 "ad_archive_id": "669937005838022",
8 "collation_count": 1,
9 "collation_id": "1607325453315755",
10 "page_id": "1765633470373416",
11 "snapshot": {
12 "branded_content": null,
13 "page_id": "1765633470373416",
14 "page_is_deleted": false,
15 "page_profile_uri": "https://www.facebook.com/miniso/",
16 "root_reshared_post": null,
17 "byline": "",
18 "disclaimer_label": null,
19 "page_name": "MINISO",
20 "page_profile_picture_url": "https://scontent-dfw5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/...",
21 "event": null,
22 "caption": "facebook.com",
23 "cta_text": "Like Page",
24 "cards": [],
25 "body": {
26 "text": "🌷Pink petals, soft smiles, and spring in full swing.😊"
27 },
28 "cta_type": "LIKE_PAGE",
29 "display_format": "IMAGE",
30 "link_description": null,
31 "link_url": "https://www.facebook.com/1765633470373416",
32 "images": [
33 {
34 "image_crops": [],
35 "original_image_url": "https://scontent-dfw5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/...",
36 "resized_image_url": "https://scontent-dfw5-3.xx.fbcdn.net/...",
37 "watermarked_resized_image_url": ""
38 }
39 ],
40 "page_categories": [
41 "Product/service"
42 ],
43 "page_like_count": 5955865,
44 "title": "MINISO",
45 "videos": [],
46 "is_reshared": false,
47 "extra_links": [],
48 "extra_texts": [],
49 "extra_images": [],
50 "extra_videos": [],
51 "country_iso_code": null,
52 "brazil_tax_id": null,
53 "additional_info": null,
54 "ec_certificates": []
55 },
56 "is_active": true,
57 "has_user_reported": false,
58 "report_count": null,
59 "menu_items": [],
60 "state_media_run_label": null,
61 "page_is_deleted": false,
62 "page_name": "MINISO",
63 "impressions_with_index": {
64 "impressions_text": null,
65 "impressions_index": -1
66 },
67 "gated_type": "ELIGIBLE",
68 "categories": [
69 "UNKNOWN"
70 ],
71 "is_aaa_eligible": true,
72 "contains_digital_created_media": false,
73 "reach_estimate": null,
74 "currency": "",
75 "spend": null,
76 "end_date": 1770105600,
77 "publisher_platform": [
78 "FACEBOOK"
79 ],
80 "start_date": 1760943600,
81 "contains_sensitive_content": false,
82 "total_active_time": null,
83 "regional_regulation_data": {
84 "finserv": {
85 "is_deemed_finserv": false,
86 "is_limited_delivery": false
87 },
88 "tw_anti_scam": {
89 "is_limited_delivery": false
90 }
91 },
92 "hide_data_status": "NONE",
93 "fev_info": null,
94 "ad_id": null,
95 "targeted_or_reached_countries": [],
96 "start_date_formatted": "2025-10-20 07:00:00",
97 "end_date_formatted": "2026-02-03 08:00:00",
98 "ad_library_url": "https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?id=669937005838022"
99 },
100 // ... 999 more ads
101 ]
102}The Solution: A Reliable API That Scales
We handle the complexity so you can focus on building your product.
High-Volume API
Reliable access at scale without rate limiting. Make thousands of requests per minute with 99.9% uptime. No IP bans, no captchas, no maintenance headaches.
- 99.9% uptime SLA
- No IP bans or captchas
- Zero maintenance overhead
Built For Your Use Case
Whether you're shipping product, serving clients, or publishing research — we've got you covered.
Ship features,
not scrapers
You need ad data as a feature in your product — competitor tracking, creative intelligence, market analysis. Building a scraper is a rabbit hole. We give you a stable API so your team stays focused on what matters.
- Drop-in REST API — integrate in an afternoon
- Webhooks push new ads to your pipeline in real-time
- 99.9% uptime SLA — your product never goes dark
$ curl metapi.io/v1/ads \
-H "Authorization: Bearer sk_..." \
-d '{"query":"shopify","country":"US"}'
// 847 ads returned in 1.2s
{
"total_count": 847,
"data": [
{ "page_name": "Shopify",
"body": "Start selling...",
"is_active": true }
]
}Kill the Monday
screenshot ritual
Your team spends hours every week manually checking competitor ads for clients. Set up automated monitoring once, get Slack alerts the instant something changes. Cover 50 brands as easily as 1.
- Automated alerts to Slack, email, or webhooks
- Track unlimited advertisers across all markets
- Creative downloads — images, videos, carousels
// Webhook fires instantly
{
"event": "new_ad_detected",
"advertiser": "Nike",
"ad_count": 3,
"ads": [
{ "headline": "Just Do It",
"format": "VIDEO",
"started": "2 min ago" }
],
"alert_rule": "competitor_watch"
}Full coverage,
zero blind spots
Academic studies, election monitoring, OSINT investigations — you need complete data, not a 10% sample. Our historical archive goes back 2+ years, and we capture ads that Meta later removes.
- 2+ years of historical archive including removed ads
- Bulk CSV export for statistical analysis
- All countries, all categories — no coverage gaps
$ curl metapi.io/v1/ads \
-d '{"query":"election",
"country":"US",
"date_range":["2024-01","2024-11"],
"include_inactive": true}'
// 142,891 ads — including 8,340 since removed
{
"total_count": 142891,
"inactive_count": 8340,
"export": "csv"
}Simple, Volume-Based Pricing
No feature gates. Every plan includes full API access, webhooks, and exports.
Join the Alpha
Free 10K records/mo. No credit card.
Every Builder Hits the Same Wall
Real quotes from Reddit. Real frustration. This is why we built metapi.io.
Stop wasting hours on manual research.
Get Early AccessFrequently Asked Questions
Yes. The Facebook Ad Library is a public transparency tool that Meta created specifically for public access — it requires no login, no authentication, and no Meta account to view. We access only publicly available data that Meta intentionally publishes for transparency purposes.
That said, we want to be transparent: Meta's Terms of Service broadly prohibit automated data collection from their platforms. However, the Ad Library exists in a unique gray area — it was created under regulatory pressure specifically to make advertising data publicly accessible. Courts in multiple jurisdictions have ruled that scraping publicly available data is not a violation of computer fraud laws (see the LinkedIn v. hiQ Labs case).
Our infrastructure is designed with compliance in mind: we don't access private user data, we don't bypass any authentication, and we only collect data that any person could see by visiting the Ad Library in their browser. Many academic institutions, newsrooms, and NGOs use similar approaches to access this data — including projects at NYU and the Wesleyan Media Project.
Bottom line: We provide programmatic access to public data. Thousands of companies use Ad Library data daily for competitive intelligence. You're in good company.
This is the #1 complaint we hear about competitors — and honestly, it's why we built metapi.io. We've seen the same frustration across the industry: tools that return 5 ads when a brand is clearly running 80+.
Our system is engineered for maximum coverage. We use multiple collection strategies, pagination handling, and verification passes to ensure we capture the full picture — not just the first page of results. We continuously benchmark our coverage against manual checks and competing tools.
We can't promise 100% (the Ad Library itself has known inconsistencies — Meta sometimes delays indexing new ads), but our goal is to be the most complete source available, and we obsess over closing every gap we find.
Pro tip: When evaluating any Ad Library tool, pick 3-5 brands you know well, manually count their ads in the official Ad Library, and compare. That's exactly the test we run internally every week.
For every ad we capture, you get:
- Ad creative — images, videos, carousels (actual media files, not just thumbnails)
- Ad copy — full primary text, headline, description, CTA button type
- Landing page URL — where the ad sends traffic
- Ad status — active or inactive
- Run dates — when the ad started (and stopped, if inactive)
- Page information — advertiser name, page ID, page category
- Platform placement — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network
- Media type classification — image, video, carousel, dynamic
For political/issue ads (where Meta provides extra transparency), you also get: spend ranges, impression ranges, and demographic distribution data.
What we DON'T have (because nobody does — Meta doesn't make this public): exact spend amounts for non-political ads, click-through rates, conversion data, or detailed targeting parameters for non-political ads.
Meta does offer an official Ad Library API, but it's extremely limited:
- It only covers political and issue ads — no commercial ads at all
- It requires a manual application and approval process
- Results are paginated at 25 items per page with strict rate limits
- No alerting, no monitoring, no creative downloads
- Data format is raw and requires significant processing
If you need data on commercial ads (which is 99% of use cases), the official API simply doesn't help. metapi.io gives you full access to all ad categories — commercial, political, social issues — with a modern API, dashboard, alerts, and historical data.
Apify is a general-purpose scraping platform where independent developers publish "actors" (scraping scripts) for various websites. There are 10+ competing Facebook Ad Library actors on Apify, and the experience is... inconsistent.
Here's what we hear from former Apify users:
- Reliability: Actors break when Meta updates the Ad Library UI. You're dependent on the actor's developer to fix it — which can take days or weeks.
- Coverage: Many actors return incomplete data. One user reported getting 5 ads when 80+ were clearly running.
- Cost: Pay-per-result pricing seems cheap ($0.75 per 1,000 ads) but scales quickly. Users report it "got too expensive and wasn't worth it" at volume.
- No features: Apify gives you raw scraping. No monitoring, no alerts, no dashboards, no historical archive. You build everything yourself.
metapi.io is purpose-built for Ad Library data. We handle all the maintenance, guarantee data quality, provide a full feature set, and offer predictable pricing. You focus on insights, not infrastructure.
These are excellent tools — each built for a specific audience. Here's how we differ:
AdSpy / BigSpy / PowerAdSpy — Spy tools built primarily for affiliates and dropshippers. They maintain their own massive ad databases (AdSpy has 150M+ ads). Great for keyword-based product research and finding winning ads across the entire Meta ecosystem. Limitation: They're opaque about data freshness, don't offer real-time monitoring of specific competitors, and pricing can be steep ($149-249/mo). They're discovery tools, not intelligence tools.
Foreplay / Swipe-worthy — Creative swipe file tools built for saving and organizing ad inspiration. They integrate with the Ad Library but focus on the "save and organize" workflow. Limitation: They don't provide data infrastructure, API access, or automated monitoring at scale.
metapi.io — We're a data infrastructure and intelligence platform. Our sweet spot is: reliable API access to Ad Library data, automated competitor monitoring with alerts, historical data archive, and export/integration capabilities. We're for teams who need the data systematically — not just occasionally browsing for inspiration.
Think of it this way: AdSpy is for "show me winning ads in the supplements niche." metapi.io is for "alert me the moment Brand X launches anything new, track all changes across my 50 tracked competitors, and pipe the data into my analytics stack."
This is the #1 operational challenge in this space, and it's the main reason we exist as a managed service rather than just open-source scripts.
Meta updates the Ad Library interface and underlying structure regularly. When this happens, DIY scrapers and Apify actors break — sometimes for days or weeks until someone fixes them.
Our approach:
- We have a dedicated infrastructure team monitoring for changes 24/7
- Automated health checks detect issues within minutes
- We maintain multiple collection strategies, so a single UI change rarely breaks everything
- Our SLA guarantees uptime — if something breaks, fixing it is our problem, not yours
This is fundamentally why "buy vs. build" makes sense for Ad Library data. Building a scraper is a weekend project. Keeping it running reliably for 12 months is a full-time engineering job. We've made that our job so you don't have to.
We're a small, responsive team — not a faceless corporation. You can reach us via:
- In-app chat — fastest response for quick questions
- Email — for detailed requests and custom requirements
- Dedicated account manager (Enterprise plans) — for onboarding, custom integrations, and priority support
If you have a use case we haven't seen before (political research, brand protection, academic study, investment analysis), we'd love to hear about it. Some of our best features started as custom requests from users with unique needs.