Adthena vs Meta Ad Library in 2026: paid-search intelligence vs Meta’s public ad record

Adthena is a search-market intelligence product for substantial Google Ads programmes. Whole Market View combines customer-site, competitor-site, and Google data into a tailored map of brand and generic keywords, competitor presence, share of voice, search terms, ad copy, and market movement. That evidence helps a search team investigate shifts, identify coverage and brand risks, and decide where attention or budget needs investigation. It is not an archive of social creative and is not designed to be the direct public record of an advertiser’s Meta activity.

The product line makes the distinction clear. ChatGPT Ads Intelligence tracks advertisers, trigger topics, AI share of voice, competitor copy, category benchmarks, and market shifts across 200 prompts. Brand Market View focuses on brand-keyword monitoring, trademark protection, ad-hijacking and conquesting detection, fraud and phishing evidence, and brand-CPC savings insight. Whole Market View adds Google AI Overview monitoring, CPC and CTR modelling, application access, API, MCP, and Google Ads and SA360 integration. Adthena says that full market product is aimed at advertisers spending $1 million or more annually on Google Ads.

ChatGPT Ads Intelligence is the public entry point at $399 per month with a 21-day no-card trial. Brand Market View and Whole Market View are custom engagements. Adthena is valuable when its market view will change repeat decisions, not when a marketer simply wants to see a competitor’s current Facebook or Instagram creative. It does not publish a Meta public-record search, general cross-social ad archive, or campaign editor.

Meta Ad Library is the appropriate source when the evidence concerns advertising that Meta makes public. Its main search surface lets a user choose a location and category, then search currently running ads across Meta technologies by keyword or advertiser. It is free, direct, and useful for checking whether a message or advertiser is in market before a strategist builds a brief. It is not a paid subscription, a saved research workspace, or a cross-channel competitive model.

The history rules matter. Meta says the library keeps social-issue, election, and political ads for seven years, EU ads for one year, and UK ads that ran after July 1, 2025 for one year. Its separate Ad Library Report supports exploration and downloads for political and issue advertising, including spending by advertiser and location. The API supports political, election, and issue ads worldwide in its stated scope, plus ads of any type in the UK or EU for the stated period. These are transparency records, not a complete worldwide archive of all completed commercial Meta ads.

Meta also publishes branded-content search for paid partnerships. None of those surfaces expose a commercial advertiser’s private bids, conversion rate, revenue, targeting logic, or profitability. There are no public paid tiers, shared swipe-file boards, alerting, or recurring commercial-monitoring workflow in the reviewed profile. Use it as first-party evidence, then organise selected examples in a separate approved research process if the team needs to return to them.