Google Ads Transparency Center API: what exists and what does not

Short version: there is no official API. Google publishes the data at adstransparency.google.com with no developer surface, no export, and no documentation. The Google Ads API is for managing your own campaigns and does not expose other advertisers' creatives.

The internal endpoint the site itself uses

The Transparency Center front end fetches its data from an internal RPC:

POST https://adstransparency.google.com/anji/_/rpc/SearchService/SearchCreatives

The request body is a form-encoded f.req parameter carrying JSON with numbered fields rather than names, the same convention Google uses for protobuf-backed services. Pagination is by cursor, page size 40, with an optional numeric region filter. Responses are unlabeled numbered structures that Google can and does reshape without notice, which is the core problem with building on it directly.

Measured rate limits

Numbers from sustained real use, not guesses:

• Throttling is per source IP and answers HTTP 429 with no Retry-After header, so you cannot tell when a block clears.
• Roughly 300 rapid requests from one IP earned a block that lasted over 90 minutes.
• Shared cloud IP ranges are throttled hardest. From a datacenter address, a single nike.com lookup returned nothing but 429s for 4 minutes 45 seconds. The same request through a rotating proxy answered in under a second.
• A politeness delay of 0.5 seconds between pages avoided blocks entirely in long runs, costing about 12 seconds per 1,000 ads.

What you can actually extract

Per creative: the advertiser ID and verified name, the creative ID and type (image, video, text or display), first and last shown timestamps, the creative image URL, and a link back to Google's own record. Per advertiser search: every matching advertiser with country and an approximate live ad count.

Build it yourself, or not

Building on the internal RPC means maintaining IP rotation, backoff that respects an unstated budget, and a parser for numbered fields that shift shape. Reasonable if scraping is your product. If you just need the data, two stable options:

• One-off lookups: the free lookup page, which searches by company name and shows creatives with a CSV download, up to 60 ads.
• Programmatic access: the hosted API version, $1.50 per 1,000 ads returned, charged only for results:

curl -s -X POST \
  'https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/sourcedirect~google-ads-transparency-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN&format=json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"advertiserNames": ["Nike"], "domains": ["nike.com"]}'