How to Find Competitor Ads on Pinterest

To find competitor ads on Pinterest, start at the Pinterest ads repository: ads.pinterest.com/ads-repository/. It is free, it needs no Pinterest account, and you can filter by advertiser, country, category, age, gender and date. I opened it while writing this with no login at all and it worked fine.

Then comes the catch nobody writing about this seems to mention. The country dropdown holds exactly 30 entries. The United States is not one of them. Neither is the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. So if the competitor you care about sells to Americans, the official library will show you nothing, and you need the second route in this article rather than the first.

It exists because of the EU Digital Services Act, which is why the coverage looks the way it does. Pinterest's own DSA disclosure puts it at 87,497,257 average monthly active users in the EU for the first half of 2026, comfortably over the line that forces a platform to publish an ad repository at all. Pinterest calls it the ads repository rather than an ad library, and it opens on a filter row with a date window already set to the last few days. That default is worth changing immediately, because a five day window on a single country is how most people conclude the tool is broken.

What one ad record actually contains

Every result carries a Details link that opens its own permanent page. Below is a real one, a clothing seller called petecoshop, exactly as the fields appeared. It is a longer list than you would expect, and most of it is empty.

This is the moment most readers actually hit, and no guide I found covers it. I searched a household beauty name in France and got "No results match your search criteria" straight back. The advertiser was in the dropdown. It still returned nothing. Work through this before deciding they are not advertising.

Here is Pinterest describing its own ads: "Ads are Pins that businesses pay to promote. They appear in your home feed and search results." Read that literally, because it is literal. A Pinterest ad is not a separate artefact built in an ads manager. It is a pin, sitting on a board, that somebody put money behind. The only difference between it and the pin next to it is a small Promoted label.

That changes what competitor research means here. On Meta, the ad library is the only way to see creative that never appears on the brand page. On Pinterest, a competitor's public profile is already the full set of things they might promote, visible to anyone, with no library involved.

This is why Pinterest is worth the trouble even when the library fails you. Below is a pin I pulled out of the AIMS library, a lip gloss ad from TODOMODA. Look at it as a piece of production rather than as a pin, because that is what it is: a finished vertical static ad, built by somebody who knew what they were doing.

Five decisions in one pin

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1

Three tiny labels across the top. Category, product type, newness. They read in about a third of a second and then stop competing with anything.

2

The headline is one word. Not a claim, not a benefit, just the shade name set enormous. On a feed built for browsing, the shade is the hook.

3

A pale starburst sits behind the product. It does no selling. It exists so the dark product separates from the dark background, which is the actual problem this ad had to solve.

4

The photograph is a macro of the texture. Not the tube on a table. The gloss itself, wet, catching a highlight, because texture is what a gloss buyer is judging.

5

The call to action is an outlined pill, not a solid button. Quiet enough to keep the ad looking editorial, obvious enough to be a target.

Five lines. That is a brief. Notice you could hand it to somebody who has never seen this pin and they could build a version for a completely different product, which is the test for whether you took the method rather than the artwork.

This is the step everything above was for, and it is where most competitor research quietly dies. People save four hundred pins and never open the folder again. The reason is that a saved pin is inspiration, and inspiration does not tell you what to do on Monday.

Image models have got very good at making things. They will hold your bottle steady across fifty frames without the label drifting. What they have never had is judgement. Ask for "a lip gloss ad" and you get the average of every ad the model has seen, which is a centred tube on a gradient, because an average is the safest answer to a vague question.

AIMS is a free searchable library of real ads, emails, videos and pins, and Pinterest sits in it next to Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon and Etsy, which is where the TODOMODA pin above came from. The free Chrome extension saves anything you find while browsing straight into it. The Discover page is the browsing half. The part that matters is what happens next: when you save something, AIMS does the teardown step itself, reads what the designer actually did, and hands that analysis to the model along with your product photography and your palette. The teardown page walks through the loop. What comes back is your product, in that structure, with none of their assets in it.