Meta's Ad Library shows you what a brand is running right now. It won't tell you how long each ad has been live, and the moment an ad is paused it disappears — no history, no record that it ever existed. So the one thing you actually want to know as a competitor — which creatives are working well enough that they keep spending on them — is the one thing the Ad Library hides.
KeptAds keeps that record. To show what the archive looks like in practice, we tracked three well-known DTC advertisers — Glossier, AG1, and HexClad — and captured every active ad in their US libraries on 5 August 2026. Every number below is counted from that capture; nothing here is estimated or modelled. You can open the same data as a live report at keptads.com/r/demo.
The headline: proven winners are where the money is
An ad that has been running for 30 days or more is not an accident. On Meta, creatives that keep spending are creatives that keep converting — the algorithm kills the rest. Counting only ads live for 30+ days on capture day:
| Brand | Active ads archived | Proven winners (30+ days) | Longest-running ad | Median age |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glossier | 109 | 19 | 83 days | 14 days |
| AG1 | 120 | 47 | 174 days | 20 days |
| HexClad | 120 | 58 | 173 days | 19 days |
HexClad and AG1 both have single ads that have been live for nearly six months. That is the single most useful thing a competitor can know: not "here is an ad they're running," but "here is an ad they have paid to keep running for 173 days." That is a validated offer, a validated hook, a validated landing page. If you compete with HexClad, those two dozen long-runners are the closest thing to a free answer key you will ever get — and Meta would have deleted every one of them the day HexClad paused it.
Glossier's median ad age is younger (14 days) with fewer long-runners, which reads as a brand testing faster and rotating creative harder — a different playbook, visible only because you can see the age distribution at all.
What format each brand actually trusts
The archive tags every ad's format. The mix is a strategy fingerprint:
- Glossier leans on dynamic creative (DCO) — 81 of 109 active ads — with a meaningful video layer (24 ads). Almost no static image ads. This is a brand letting Meta assemble and optimise creative combinations at scale.
- AG1 is even more DCO-dominant: 109 of 120. When a brand runs one system this hard, it is a signal they've found a machine that works and are feeding it budget rather than hand-crafting ads.
- HexClad is the most balanced — 48 DCO, 47 video, 22 static image. A competitor reading this should note HexClad still invests in produced video at near-parity with dynamic creative, which is unusual and expensive, and probably reflects a product that demos well on camera.
The hooks they repeat
KeptAds classifies each new ad's hook. The recurring ones tell you what message each brand has decided is worth saying over and over:
- HexClad hammers proof and safety: "55k+ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews", "Free From Forever Chemicals", "Nontoxic Pans Worth Every Penny!" — review-count social proof and a health angle, repeated across multiple live ads.
- AG1 runs a wellness-authority frame — "Welcome to the Next Gen of Wellness", "Energy Support Without The Crash" — plus celebrity-anchored creative (a Hugh Jackman ad among the long-runners).
- Glossier's recurring hooks skew to UGC testimonial and problem-callout formats rather than a single repeated line — consistent with the faster-rotation pattern in the age data.
None of this required a single guess. It is counted from a full-library capture, and because KeptAds keeps the creatives, a competitor could pull up the exact winning ad from 83 days ago even after Glossier retires it.
Why the archive is the point
If you screenshot a competitor's library today, you have a snapshot. In a week half of it is gone and you have no way to tell which half mattered. The value is not the snapshot — it is the diff over time: which ad launched, which one they killed after 72 hours (a failed test you can skip), and which one they've quietly kept alive for six months (an offer you should study).
That is what KeptAds does every day, for every competitor page you give it, and packages into a report you can forward to a client on Monday. Your archive only starts the day you do — so the sooner you start tracking, the deeper the record you'll have when you actually need it.
Run a free snapshot of any competitor at keptads.com, or see the full three-brand report at keptads.com/r/demo. Data captured 5 August 2026; ad counts and dates are as recorded on that day.