TikTok Ads Library: The Two Libraries, and How to Search Them

Every entry in the Commercial Content Library names the advertiser, the person or company that paid when that is different (an agency, for example), the dates the ad was first and last shown, and an estimate of the unique users who saw it at least once. TikTok defines each field in the library FAQ. You also get the ad video, the ad ID and a targeting summary: age, gender, location, interest categories and other parameters.

Reach by age and gender, since June 2026

TikTok started to break unique reach down by age and gender in June 2026. An ad shown before that date shows reach by country only. If you compare a competitor's ads across the summer of 2026, compare the country numbers, because the older ads have nothing else.

Paused and disapproved ads are listed too

The library holds active ads, ads the advertiser paused and ads TikTok disapproved for a policy breach. A disapproved ad cannot be played, but its summary and targeting stay visible. That makes the library a useful record of what a competitor tried and lost.

Brand partnerships sit in a second library

The menu has two parts: the Ad Library for paid ads, and Other commercial content for posts creators marked as commercial, such as brand partnerships. The second part is searched by creator country and username.

The search takes a country, then a name, then filters. These steps follow TikTok's own search instructions. New ads usually appear within 24 hours of a campaign starting.

Top Ads is "a collection of high-performing creatives that can be filtered by Region, Industry, Campaign Objective, and more", in TikTok's words. Each ad comes with a second-by-second graph of where viewers kept watching and where they left. Use it to learn a format, not to track a rival.

What you can filter

Region, industry, campaign objective (traffic, app installs, conversions, video views, reach, lead generation, product sales and engagement) and a period of the last 7, 30 or 180 days.

What a login changes

Creative Center is free and needs no login, but logging in unlocks all features and data. Logged out, a list shows a limited set of ads and asks you to log in for more. Keyword Insights, which shows the top phrases in TikTok ads, needs a login too.

How to read the retention graph

Look for the second where the line drops hardest. That is where the hook stopped working. Then compare it with your own ads, or with a creator post you plan to boost as a TikTok Spark Ad.

The library exists because the EU requires it. Article 39 of the Digital Services Act tells very large online platforms to publish a searchable repository of the ads they show, with an API, until one year after each ad was last shown. That is where the one-year rule comes from.

The law lists the minimum for each ad: its content, on whose behalf it was shown, who paid, the period it ran, whether it targeted particular groups and how, and the total recipients reached, by member state where that applies. Read the library's fields against that list and its shape makes sense: it is a compliance archive first and a research tool second.

Researchers can also query it through the Commercial Content API, which returns ad and advertiser metadata, targeting and reach. Anyone can apply through a TikTok for Developers account, and the requester can be in any country.

If your competitors sell only in the United States, use the two routes that do work. First, check the same brand in Europe: many US brands also run ads in the UK or Germany, and those land in the library. Second, use Creative Center Top Ads for the format, then check the brand's Facebook and Instagram ads, which the Meta Ad Library lists in every country.

Each of the other platforms has its own rules. Pinterest also archives only the EU, Norway, Turkey and Brazil (see our Pinterest ad library guide), LinkedIn's library is searchable by company, payer, keyword and country (LinkedIn ad library), and Google shows ads by advertiser domain in the Google Ads Transparency Center. For a paid layer on top of the free libraries, see the free ad spy tools we checked.

A library tells you what a competitor ran. Your next ad still has to be made. Selzee reads what your competitors run in the TikTok, Meta, Google and Pinterest ad libraries, next to what is winning across your market, and recreates those winning ads for your brand, with your products, logo, fonts and colours. Every ad comes with the angle and the insight it is built on.

Selzee has no ad library you can browse or search: it does the reading in the background. For a closer look at what creator-led ads open on, see our UGC ad examples, and for testing what you make, our TikTok ads best practices. To see how a competitor's ad performed against the norm, check its post with the TikTok engagement rate calculator. We covered how to read a rival's ads in more depth in competitor ads analysis.