How to Find Competitor Ads on LinkedIn

Go to linkedin.com/ad-library, enter the exact company name LinkedIn has on file in the Advertiser field, and run the search. That returns every ad currently serving under that advertiser, no login or LinkedIn account required. The catch is the word "currently": the moment a competitor's campaign ends, its ads disappear from the results with no way to look them up again, so what you see is always a live snapshot, never a history. It also only answers for one company at a time, with no way to search a whole category in a single query. AdPeekly indexes the same kind of public LinkedIn ad data but keeps every ad after the campaign ends, stamped with the date it started and the date it was last seen, and searches across every tracked company at once instead of one advertiser per search. That combination, an archive plus cross-company search, is what turns an occasional check into something you can actually monitor over time.

LinkedIn's Ad Library only covers ads running on LinkedIn itself, so it will show a competitor's sponsored LinkedIn posts but nothing they're running as display ads elsewhere, on other ad networks, publisher sites, or programmatic exchanges. Tracking those requires a different tool entirely, since no single public library covers display inventory the way LinkedIn's does for its own platform. What you can do on LinkedIn specifically is repeat the company-name search on a schedule, since there's no saved search or alert here, and watch for the same creative reappearing after a gap, which usually signals a campaign being relaunched or scaled. If your competitor research is really about winning creative ideas rather than the specific ad network, LinkedIn is worth tracking on its own merits regardless: it's where B2B advertisers spend the most deliberate creative effort, and AdPeekly's archive of ended and running campaigns is built specifically to make that ongoing tracking practical instead of a manual weekly chore.

Not in LinkedIn's own Ad Library. It only lists ads that are currently serving impressions, so once a campaign stops, its ads are removed with no archive, no historical record and no way to search for them again, even a week later. That's a structural design choice, the tool exists for present-moment transparency, not as a competitive research archive, so this isn't a bug to work around, it's a hard limit. AdPeekly's dataset is built to cover exactly this gap: it revisits the same public Ad Library on a repeating schedule and keeps every ad it finds after LinkedIn drops it, stamped with the date it was first seen running and the date it was last seen. A real example: a 15Five ad headlined "Invest in employee engagement" ran for 93 days ending in June 2025, over a year before today, and no longer appears in LinkedIn's own tool at all. AdPeekly still has it, first-seen and last-seen date included.

It confirms the post is a paid, disclosed advertisement rather than organic content someone posted for free, which is a legal transparency requirement, not a quality signal. It tells you nothing about how long the ad has been running, whether it's an established top performer being scaled up in spend or a brand-new variant still being tested, or how it stacks up against the advertiser's other creatives. Two ads can carry the identical badge, one running for three days as an unproven test and the other running for three months because it kept converting, and the badge alone can't tell them apart. To read that difference you need duration data the badge doesn't carry: AdPeekly stamps every ad with first-seen and last-seen dates specifically so an ad still running after 90 days, the kind an advertiser evidently kept paying for, can be told apart from one that's simply new.