Written by Elias Saliba | Founder, Adchievers
Elias is a performance marketing specialist with over ten years of experience running paid campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and X for 250+ clients in 28+ countries, including agencies and direct advertisers across the Levant and the Gulf. He has personally overseen more than $30M in managed ad spend and writes from direct, real-world campaign experience.
Nobody Can See the Exact Number, and That’s Fine
Let’s settle this immediately: 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.
Tier One: Evidence That’s Already Public
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.
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.
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 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.
Tier Three: Paid Tools That Estimate What You Can’t See Directly
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.
| Tool | What It’s Best At | Starting Price | Where It’s Weakest |
| Semrush | Paid traffic estimates, keyword-level detail | ~$140/month | Smaller regional domains with less crawl data |
| SpyFu | Historical spend trends over time | ~$39–$79/month | Same regional data thinness as Semrush |
| SimilarWeb | Paid vs. organic traffic split | Free tier available; paid plans vary | Broad estimates, less keyword-level 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.
The Regional Reliability Question Nobody Answers
This matters specifically for Lebanon and the UAE, and most guides covering this topic skip it entirely: these tools build their traffic models primarily from larger, higher-volume markets. A US or UK domain with millions of monthly visits gives Semrush or SpyFu a lot of signal to model from. A mid-sized Beirut or Dubai-based competitor with a few thousand monthly visits gives these same tools far less to work with, and the resulting spend estimate should be treated as a much rougher range, sometimes off by a wide margin, rather than a confident figure.
This doesn’t make the tools useless regionally, it makes them directional rather than precise. For a well-known multinational running ads in your market, the estimate is usually reasonably close. For a smaller, purely local competitor, weight Tier One and Tier Two evidence, what you can actually see them running, more heavily than any modeled dollar figure Tier Three gives you.
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.
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, focused advertiser who owns one specific gap consistently often outperforms a bigger spender stretched thin across everything, and frequently captures share more efficiently while doing it.
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
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.
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.