If you’re trying to figure out how to check competitors’ Google Ads budget, here’s the honest starting point: no tool, free or paid, shows you a competitor’s actual Google Ads budget. That number lives inside their account and nowhere else. Anyone claiming to hand you an exact figure is guessing with confidence, not reporting a fact.
What’s actually available is better described as evidence, not a number. Some of it comes free, straight from Google itself. Some of it costs money and estimates spend by modeling traffic against typical click costs. Layered together, this evidence gives you something genuinely useful: a sense of scale, where a competitor is active, and where they’ve left gaps you can move into. Here’s that evidence, organized from what costs nothing to what costs the most.
One thing worth stating plainly rather than leaving implied: every method in this guide works from information Google’s and Meta’s own advertising policies and terms of service already make publicly visible to any searcher, or from your own account’s auction data, which Google explicitly provides for exactly this kind of comparison. Nothing here requires bypassing either platform’s terms.
Tier One: How to Find Your Competitors’ Ads for Free
Search It Yourself, in a Private Window
Open an incognito or private browser window and search your five to ten most commercially important keywords. Note who shows up at the top and bottom of the results, what their headlines say, and what they’re offering. A private window matters here, it strips out your own search history’s influence on what Google decides to show you.
Do this consistently across your keyword list and a pattern appears fast. Brands showing up on nearly every search are running a real, sustained budget. Brands appearing sporadically are testing, or budget-constrained, or targeting only their highest-intent terms.
One outcome worth naming directly, since it trips people up: if a competitor shows up consistently in organic results but never in ads, that’s not a failed search, that’s a finding. It usually means they’ve deliberately decided paid search isn’t worth it for their model, or they simply haven’t tried it yet. Either way, an organic-only competitor typically means less paid competition for you on that keyword, not nothing to analyze, treat it as a genuine coverage gap and move on to the competitors who are actually running ads.
The Google Ads Transparency Center
This is the most underused free resource in this entire process. Visit Google Ads Transparency Center and search any brand by name or domain. It shows every ad that advertiser is currently running or has recently run, across Search, Display, and YouTube, filterable by format, region, and time period. No account needed, entirely free, and pulled directly from Google’s own ad-serving records rather than modeled from outside data.
Here’s the exact click path: go to Campaigns, Ad groups, or Search keywords from the Campaigns menu, check the box next to the specific campaigns, ad groups, or keywords you want to examine, then select Auction insights from the toolbar above the table. If you selected a mix of Search, Shopping, or Performance Max campaigns, you’ll need to pick which one to view from a dropdown once the report loads.
USD-billed client account, one-month period: sessions up 10%, total sales up 17% to $55,260, orders up 14%, conversion rate up 4%, the kind of gap-filling, tightly targeted growth this research process is meant to help you find. Client and account details withheld for confidentiality.
The Meta Ad Library
If a competitor also runs Facebook or Instagram alongside Google, the Meta Ad Library shows every active ad creative they’re running, how long each has been live, and which regions they’re targeting, publicly, with no account required. An ad that’s been running for months is almost always a winner; competitors don’t keep paying for something that isn’t working. Even if Google Ads is your only concern, checking this tells you what messaging is actually landing for them right now.
Tier Two: The Free Tool Most People Skip Entirely
Here’s the gap in most competitor-research advice, including guides that cover the tools above reasonably well: Google gives you a native, first-party competitive report inside your own account, and it doesn’t require guessing at anything from the outside.
It’s called Auction Insights, and it’s worth being precise about what it requires: it isn’t a public lookup anyone can access. You need your own active Google Ads account with live campaigns already running in the relevant auctions, available at the keyword, ad group, or campaign level for Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns. Google’s own documentation explains exactly how to use auction insights to compare performance, and it’s worth reading directly before relying on it.
It won’t show you a dollar figure, Google doesn’t expose that to other advertisers, ever. What it does show is who else is competing for the exact same auctions you’re in, and how you compare: impression share (what percentage of eligible auctions your ad showed in), overlap rate (how often a specific competitor’s ad showed alongside yours), outranking share (how often you beat them, or they beat you, when both ads appeared), and position above rate. This is the closest thing to real competitive intelligence available anywhere, because it isn’t modeled from outside signals, it’s Google reporting on auctions you were both actually in.
One limitation worth knowing before you go looking for it: Auction Insights doesn’t show results when your own impression share for that keyword or campaign is below 10 percent. If you’re brand new to a keyword, you may not have enough activity yet for the report to populate at all. It also behaves differently by campaign type: for Search, it’s keyword and auction-based, showing exactly who you’re up against on specific terms; for Shopping and Performance Max, it’s product- or asset-group-based instead, since there’s no single keyword auction to report on, so don’t expect a direct comparison between the two.
Reading the Metrics Together, Not One at a Time
Individually defined, these four metrics don’t tell you much. Read in combination, they tell you where to focus first:
- High overlap rate + you’re losing outranking share: a competitor isn’t just present, they’re consistently beating you in the same auctions. This is the one worth investigating today.
- High overlap rate + you’re winning outranking share: you’re already ahead where it counts. Worth understanding why, so the position holds rather than erodes quietly.
- Low overlap rate but high individual impression share elsewhere: they’re active in the category but not fighting you directly, likely a different keyword focus worth understanding before writing them off as irrelevant.
That combination, not any single metric on its own, is what tells you which competitor deserves your limited research time first.
Tier Three: How to Look Up Ad Spend for Companies Using Paid Tools
These tools don’t access anyone’s private account data. They model spend by combining a domain’s estimated traffic with typical cost-per-click benchmarks for the keywords driving that traffic. The output is a range, not a receipt, but a well-modeled range is still genuinely useful for sizing up how serious a competitor’s investment is.
Semrush and SpyFu both offer a way to test this before paying: Semrush runs a 7-day free trial, and SpyFu, while it doesn’t offer a free trial, backs its paid plans with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Either way, test on a competitor you already know something about first, so you have a sanity check for how close the estimate lands.
| Tool | Best At | Starting Price | Best For | Weakest At |
| Semrush | Paid traffic estimates, keyword detail | ~$140/mo, 7-day trial | Agencies, larger accounts | Smaller regional domains |
| SpyFu | Historical spend trends | ~$39–$79/mo, no trial, 30-day refund | Solo advertisers, small budgets | Same regional thinness as Semrush |
| SimilarWeb | Paid vs. organic split | Free tier; paid plans vary | A quick first check, any size | Broad estimates, less keyword detail |
Semrush leans toward keyword-level depth and current traffic estimates. SpyFu’s distinguishing strength is historical tracking, seeing when a competitor’s spend jumped tells you something real about their seasonal cycles or a recent product launch. SimilarWeb is the broadest of the three, useful for a quick paid-versus-organic split across a domain’s entire traffic, not just search.
A Worked Example
Say Semrush estimates a competitor’s domain receives roughly 4,000 monthly clicks from paid search, and the average CPC across their visible keyword set is $3.50. That’s a rough estimated monthly spend of $14,000, arrived at by multiplying estimated clicks by estimated CPC, the same basic mechanism every one of these tools uses under the hood, just with more or less keyword-level granularity depending on the platform. Treat that $14,000 as a scale indicator, comfortably mid-sized, actively competing, not a number to plan your own budget against directly.
Do These Tools Actually Work for Lebanon and UAE Domains?
This is the honest gap most guides covering this topic skip, and it deserves real numbers, not just a caveat.
Semrush’s own documentation confirms coverage across 140+ country databases. But that coverage isn’t even.
The platform’s total keyword index runs into the tens of billions, and the depth is heavily concentrated in its largest markets, the US database alone accounts for billions of keywords on its own, several times the size of most other single-country databases combined.
A UAE or Lebanon domain is covered, but it’s drawing from a comparatively thin slice of that index next to a US or UK competitor.
That data gap matters more in the UAE than it might elsewhere, precisely because the market itself is large enough to be worth watching closely: UAE digital ad spend was estimated at roughly $2.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $2.64 billion in 2026, a genuinely competitive, fast-moving market where a thin data slice can miss real movement.
Lebanon’s market is considerably smaller and less consistently tracked by these same third-party platforms, which is precisely why a smaller domain there is likely to return a rougher, less confident spend estimate than a UAE competitor of similar size.
The practical takeaway: for a multinational or a large UAE-based competitor, treat a Semrush or SpyFu estimate as reasonably close. For a smaller, purely local competitor in either market, treat the same estimate as a rough order-of-magnitude signal only, and lean more heavily on what you can directly observe through the Transparency Center, Meta Ad Library, and your own Auction Insights data instead.
There’s a layer beneath this worth checking manually, since no tool covers it well: Franco-Arabic, Arabic written in Latin script and numerals (“3ala” for على, “7abibi” for حبيبي), common in casual search behavior across Lebanon and, to a lesser extent, the UAE. Tools built for standard Arabic or English script essentially don’t recognize it as a variant, so a competitor capturing Franco-Arabic search traffic, deliberately or not, can be running a real, converting campaign that every tool in this guide simply misses. A manual search using a few common Franco-Arabic phrasings for your category is the only reliable way to catch this.
USD-billed client account, one-month period: sessions up 6%, total sales up 13% to $110,750, orders up 10%, conversion rate up 4%, the outcome of competing on relevance and coverage rather than trying to outspend a larger rival. Client and account details withheld for confidentiality.
A Tracker to Actually Use
The example below is illustrative, not real account data, meant as a starting template you can copy into your own spreadsheet or this document and fill in as you go. Update it monthly.
| Competitor | Est. Monthly Spend | Top Keywords Seen | Recurring Offer / Angle |
| [Competitor A] | [e.g. $8,000–$12,000] | [keyword, keyword] | [e.g. free trial] |
| [Competitor B] | [fill in] | [fill in] | [fill in] |
| [Competitor C] | [fill in] | [fill in] | [fill in] |
What to Actually Do With Any of This
The instinct once you see a competitor spending more than you is to try to match it. Resist that. A competitor outspending you ten to one isn’t a budget problem to solve by finding ten times the budget, it’s a coverage problem to solve by finding what they’re not covering.
- Look for keywords where their presence is weak or inconsistent across your searches.
- Look for audience segments or geographies their ads seem to ignore.
- Look for a messaging angle or offer type they haven’t claimed.
A smaller advertiser who consistently owns one specific gap often beats a bigger spender stretched thin across everything, and Quality Score plays a real part in that, more on exactly how in the FAQ below.
Everything above is scoped to Google Ads specifically, since Auction Insights and the Transparency Center are Google-only tools. If a competitor is also active on Meta or TikTok, the Meta Ad Library covers the same research need there, worth treating as a separate check rather than assuming Google-side findings apply across every channel.
A Simple Way to Start This Week
1. Search your five most important keywords in a private window and note who consistently appears.
2. Look up your top three competitors by domain in the Google Ads Transparency Center.
3. Check Auction Insights inside your own account for the campaigns where you already have enough impression share to see it.
4. Check the Meta Ad Library for the same competitors, even if Google is your only channel, their creative direction is still worth knowing.
5. If the picture still feels incomplete, run one Semrush or SpyFu search on a top competitor’s domain and treat the output as a range, not a fact.
6. Log what you find, competitor names, rough spend ranges, keyword overlaps, recurring offers, somewhere you’ll actually revisit monthly.
Questions People Ask Alongside This One
Are these tools’ spend estimates reliable for Lebanon or UAE competitors specifically?
More reliable for larger, well-established competitors than for small, purely local ones. These platforms concentrate their deepest data in their largest markets, so a UAE or Lebanon domain returns an estimate drawn from comparatively thinner coverage. Treat the number as a directional range and weight it more heavily for a multinational than for a small regional competitor, where Tier One and Tier Two evidence will usually tell you more.
Is there any tool that shows the exact number?
No. Every third-party spend figure is modeled from traffic and CPC data, not pulled from a competitor’s actual account. Treat every estimate as a range, never a precise figure.
Does Auction Insights show me a competitor’s budget?
No, and this is a common misconception. It shows how often you and a specific competitor showed up in the same auctions and who tended to win, impression share, overlap rate, outranking share, not a dollar amount. It’s the most reliable directional signal available precisely because it’s Google’s own data, but it was never designed to reveal spend.
Does this still work if a competitor only runs Shopping or Performance Max, not Search?
Auction Insights still works, but differently. For Search campaigns, the report is keyword and auction-based, showing exactly who you’re competing against on specific terms. For Shopping and Performance Max, it’s product- or asset-group-based instead, since there’s no single keyword auction to report on, so don’t expect a like-for-like comparison between a Search-only competitor and a Shopping-only one.
What if Semrush’s estimate and what I see in the Transparency Center don’t match?
Trust the Transparency Center and your own manual search first, they show what’s actually running right now, pulled directly from Google’s ad-serving records. Treat a Semrush or SpyFu estimate as a supporting data point, not the deciding one, when the two disagree. A mismatch usually means the competitor recently changed strategy faster than the third-party tool’s model has caught up, which is itself useful information about how actively they’re adjusting.
How often should I check what competitors are spending?
Monthly is reasonable for most businesses. If you’re in a fast-moving or seasonal category, check weekly, competitor behavior shifts, and last quarter’s picture can look very different from today’s.
My competitor is clearly spending more than me. Should I match it?
Not automatically. Outspending isn’t the same as outperforming. Start by finding the coverage gaps they’ve left, then look at your own Quality Score and ad relevance, since a stronger Quality Score can let you compete effectively at a lower cost per click than a bigger, less relevant competitor is paying.
Can competitors see my budget the same way?
No more than you can see theirs, your account data is equally private. What they can see is your creative, your offers, and which keywords you’re showing up for, since your ads themselves are public. Your strategy is partially visible through your ads; your budget stays hidden either way.
How do I know if a competitor recently increased their spend?
Watch for more frequent appearances across your tracked keywords, new ad formats showing up that weren’t there before, and a visible spike in SpyFu’s or Semrush’s estimated traffic data for their domain. None of these confirm an exact number, but together they’re a reliable signal that something changed.
Where Adchievers Fits In
This exact process, Transparency Center, Auction Insights, and paid tools layered together and read against each other rather than any single source, is how we build competitive positioning for clients before we ever set a budget. We manage paid advertising across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and X for clients across 28+ countries. Explore our Google Ads service page to see how we approach this research in practice, or visit our homepage to reach the team directly.
About the Author
Written by Elias Saliba | Founder, Adchievers
Elias Saliba is the founder of Adchievers, a performance marketing agency managing paid advertising across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and X for clients in 28+ countries, with campaign experience across the Lebanese and UAE markets specifically. With over $30M in managed ad spend and 250+ clients worldwide, every article he writes is grounded in real campaign experience, not theory.