How to find a Google advertiser ID (the AR number)

Every verified Google advertiser has an ID that starts with AR followed by twenty digits. Stripe, Inc. for example is AR16951989901585285121. You need it when you want to pull an advertiser's ads programmatically, reference an advertiser unambiguously, or keep following them after they change domains.

Method 1: copy it from Google's URL

1. Open adstransparency.google.com
2. Search the brand and click the advertiser you want
3. The address bar now reads adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR…
4. The AR part of that URL is the advertiser ID

This works when Google's own search finds the brand, and it often does not. Suggestions come back unsorted and filed under registered company names, so a search for a well known brand can surface unrelated soundalikes first, or miss the brand entirely while its domain matches fine.

Method 2: look it up by company name

The free lookup page takes a plain company name and returns every matching advertiser with its country, its live ad count, and the advertiser ID printed under the name. Click a row to see the actual creatives.

The ad count is how you pick the right one. The real Stripe runs about 600 ads. "Stripe A Lot" runs 20. When several similar names appear, the one actually spending money is almost always the one you want.

Why the advertiser is not called what you expect

Google files advertisers under the registered legal entity, not the brand. Nike's ads sit under Nike Retail BV. Stripe's sit under Stripe, Inc. A regional reseller can appear under a company name with no visible connection to the brand at all. That is why searching a brand name returns a list rather than one answer, and why the ID matters: it stays the same however the display name reads.

Using the ID

Paste it into Google's own site to jump straight to the advertiser:

https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR16951989901585285121

Or feed it to the API version to export every ad the advertiser runs, worldwide, as CSV or JSON: creative type, first and last shown dates, image URLs and links back to Google's record, at $1.50 per 1,000 ads returned.