Hey Sumo-lings!

We just shipped one of the most-requested upgrades yet, and every tier gets it: alert rules that go beyond "your competitor launched a new ad."

A new ad is interesting. But the two most telling moments happen later:

1. An ad that's STILL running after 30 days. Nobody pays to run a losing ad for a month. That's the competitor's own money telling you a creative works.

2. That same ad stopping. A proven winner getting pulled usually means something changed - the offer, the season, or the performance.

Both used to pass silently. Three new alert rules, live in your workspace today:

PROVEN CREATIVE - When an ad crosses your chosen run-time mark (7, 15, 30 or 90 days), you get one alert with the ad and its exact run length. It fires once per ad, ever.

WINNER PULLED - When an ad that ran past that mark stops, you get the retirement notice with how long it survived. That's your cue to study what they're replacing it with.

LAUNCH BURST - When a competitor puts 5+ ads live in one sweep (you pick the number), you hear about it. Relaunches count too: if they relight last season's whole catalogue, you'll know a promotion is coming before it peaks.

A few things we were careful about:

- Every alert is a fact read straight from the ad library: a run length, a stop, a count. We never predict "ad fatigue" or estimate anything. If we can't prove it, we don't send it.

- One event, one ping. A launch burst reframes your new-ad alert instead of doubling it.

- Everything reaches the places your alerts already go: email, Slack, Teams, Discord and webhooks.

- The weekly digest picks these up too, so a competitor whose only move was quietly keeping a winner alive now shows up in your Monday report.

Set your rules under Settings -> Alerts. They're on by default with sensible thresholds, and you can tune or mute each one.

Keep the feedback coming on the ideas board - it's what shapes the next one.

Hi Sumo-lings,

When you back a deal early you're partly betting the founders keep building. Here's what's landed since launch.

Audience reached (new this week)

Every ad library shows you what competitors are running. None of them tell you how it went. Rival Ads now shows the audience a Meta ad actually reached — the number, the age and gender split, which countries it landed in, who the advertiser aimed at, and who paid for it.

One honest caveat: Meta only publishes this for ads delivered to the EU and the UK. Where it exists, we show it exactly as published. We don't estimate ad spend and we won't start — a made-up number is worse than no number.

Landing pages

We capture the page behind each ad, with the date we captured it. The offer, the price, the headline they're sending traffic to — the half of the funnel an ad library never shows. Competitors edit and pull those pages; you keep the record.

Benchmark

Your competitors side by side: who launched most, who's running longest, what mix of angles and formats each is betting on. A competitor we couldn't read says so rather than showing zeros — silence isn't the same as inactivity.

Inspiration (opt-in)

Turn it on and your board joins a shared pool with other participating workspaces, and you get to browse theirs. Thousands of live ads, plus the aggregate: which hooks keep running, which angles are rotating, which advertisers are scaling. It's anonymous in both directions — nobody sees who tracks what.

Alerts wherever you work

New competitor ads reach you in Slack, Teams, Discord, n8n or your own webhook — not just email. Connect Slack in two clicks and pick the channel in Slack's own UI.

Creative intelligence on every ad

Each ad gets read once: transcript, on-screen text, the verbatim hook, angle, persona and CTA. Hooks are quoted, never paraphrased — you're reading their words, not our summary of them.

Refer & earn

There's a referral link in your sidebar. 50% of every payment, every month, for as long as they stay. First-touch attribution, permanent.

What's next

Run-time filtering (sort a board by how long an ad has survived - the strongest public signal a creative works), full-text search across everything we've read, and notes on saved ads so you can hand a client a folder with your reasoning attached.

Every feature above came from someone telling us what was missing. The feature board in your dashboard is where those land — post there and vote, we read all of it.

Thank you for your support!

When we launched here, the pitch was simple: track your competitors' ads across Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn, and get an AI read on every single creative.

Recently, one of the most-voted request on our roadmap was some version of the same thing: "I know who my competitors are. What I don't know is what's working everywhere else."

So we built Inspiration, and today it ships to every plan.

Here's the deal, and it's a straight swap. Opt in, and the ads your monitors already collect join a shared pool. In exchange, you get everything every other participating workspace is collecting. Your competitor list stays private - ads in the pool never say who contributed them. Nobody sees who you're watching.

That's the part we want to be clear about: this only works because people share. So we made sharing worth it.

What you actually get:

The feed. Every ad in the pool, filtered by channel, format, angle and visual style. Sort by longest-running to find proven winners - nobody keeps paying to run a creative that doesn't convert.

Trends. What angles the market is using. What the creative looks like. How fast competitors are rotating creative, how many ads launch each week, and - our favourite - which video lengths keep running longest. Not what advertisers make. What keeps getting paid for.

Hooks. The opening lines running longest across the pool, quoted verbatim. Plus how those hooks tend to open, so you can see the formulas rather than guess at them.

Words. The vocabulary the market is actually using, counted once per ad so one loud advertiser can't skew it.

Advertisers. Who's running the most, how many are live, and their longest-running creative. Your next competitor hit-list, built from real spend.

Every tab reads your filters. Narrow to TikTok video and you get that slice of the market, on its own.

This is the kind of research layer other tools put behind a separate monthly subscription. You're not paying that. You paid once. It's included on every tier, and it gets better every week as the pool grows - which means your deal is worth more today than the day you bought it.

Switch it on from the Inspiration tab, or in Settings. Owners can toggle it any time - and turning it off removes your ads from the pool immediately.

Thank you for backing us early. Keep the requests coming!

- The Rival Ads team

Hey Sumo-lings,

When we launched, we put a public feature board in the product and promised we'd build what you voted for, in the order you voted for it. Today we shipped the top three. All of them came from you.

1. See the landing page behind every ad

An ad library shows you the creative. It never shows you the offer. The price, the guarantee, the headline, the form - all of that lives on the page the ad points to, and until now it was the invisible half of your competitor's funnel.

Rival Ads now captures that page and shows it beside the creative. You see what they're actually sending traffic to, with the date we captured it, because a landing page changes and a screenshot without a date is just a guess.

The detail we like most: we group by destination, not by ad. So when a competitor runs 40 creatives at one offer page, you see that. The number of ads pointing at a page tells you where their budget is going, which no single ad ever will. Live now on Meta monitors, where destination data exists.

2. Benchmark your competitors against each other

Every screen in Rival Ads used to show one competitor at a time. That's the wrong shape once you're tracking nine or ten of them.

The new Benchmark view puts them side by side: who launched the most ads this period, who stopped the most, who's sitting on a back catalogue they never turn off, which formats each one leans on, and who has gone quiet.

3. Competitor alerts in Slack

Your team already lives in Slack. Making them check another inbox to find out a competitor launched something is a good way to make sure nobody finds out.

Connect a Slack channel in two clicks and new-ad alerts land there with the creatives. You pick the channel in Slack's own screen - we ask for permission to post to that one channel and nothing else. No reading your messages, no access to anything you didn't choose.

Not on Slack? There's a webhook field right beside it for Teams, Discord, n8n, Zapier or anything else that takes a JSON POST.

What's next

The board is still open and still decides the order. Microsoft Ads, an AI ad gap analysis and keyword-based research are all sitting near the top right now. If you want something, go put it up there or add your vote - that's genuinely how this queue works.

Thank you for the votes, the bug reports and the honest feedback and your support. Keep it coming.

Hey Sumo-lings 👋

Competitor intelligence becomes much more useful when it can meet you inside the tools where you already work.

Today, we’re opening two new ways to build with Rival Ads:

- The Rival Ads Public API (Beta) for scripts, dashboards, reporting pipelines, and custom automations.

- The Rival Ads MCP Server (Beta) for connecting compatible AI clients directly to your live Rival Ads workspace.

This means Rival Ads no longer needs to be another tab you keep checking.

You can pull current competitor ads into an internal dashboard, organize your swipe file from another tool, update client report links automatically, or ask an AI client to find recent launches and summarize what changed.

Built for real workflows

The API and MCP server can work with your:

- Competitor monitors and projects

- Current and historical ads

- Strategy reads

- Swipe-file folders and saved ads

- Client report links

- Sync requests and their progress

Both use the same rules and data as the Rival Ads dashboard, so you are not working with a cut-down second version of the product.

Your workspace stays in your control

Workspace owners can create read-only or read-and-write API keys, choose an expiry, and revoke them at any time.

Interactive AI clients can connect through a secure approval screen, so you never need to hand over your password or expose an API key. Each connection is limited to the permissions you approve and can be disconnected whenever you choose.

Why “Beta”?

The complete API and MCP surface has been tested end to end, including every currently available action.

We’re calling it Beta because we want the next round of improvements to come from the workflows you actually build - not from us guessing in isolation. Some naming and setup details may evolve as that feedback comes in.

You’ll find everything under Settings → Developer, including your API keys, connected AI clients, server URLs, setup guide, and interactive API reference.

If you try it, please tell us:

What are you connecting Rival Ads to, and what is the first workflow you want to automate?

We’ll be reading every reply.