Google Ads Transparency Center: what it shows when your account is hijacked, and what it doesn't
Google AdsThe Google Ads Transparency Center is a searchable archive of ads from verified advertisers, launched on 29 March 2023. You search by advertiser name or website, filter by region, date, platform and format, and it covers ads on Search, Play, Maps, Shopping and YouTube for a year after they ran. It's a useful outside view, but it won't reliably show a hijack: after our own account was taken over, it showed 0 ads for our domain.
By the stopfakeclicks team. Google's pages checked on Oct 16, 2026.
How to search it
- 1Search for an advertiser's verified name or for a website.
- 2Filter by region, time period, platform and ad format.
- 3For each advertiser you see the ads it ran, in which regions, when each ad was last shown and its format.
- 4To report an ad that shouldn't be running, use “Report this ad” on the ad's detail page.
What it can and can't tell you after a hijack
It can show ads running under your own verified advertiser name or pointing to your own website. It can miss the rest:
- An advertiser that hasn't completed advertiser verification may not appear at all.
- An ad taken down for a policy violation may not appear, nor one shown in the last 48 to 72 hours, nor one that hasn't run in the past 365 days.
- Ads that send people to someone else's website don't show up when you search for your own domain.
- It isn't meant for checking landing pages: the ads in it aren't clickable, and Google says that change is permanent.
What it showed after our own hijack
On the night of 17 to 18 September 2026, two campaigns we never created appeared in our Google Ads account, with daily budgets of £15,000 and £5,000.
One had bing.com as its final URL and a tracking template that redirected to a foreign domain. Google disapproved the ad for “Destination mismatch”.
On 16 October we searched the Transparency Center: 0 ads for our company's domain, any time, all regions, and no advertiser under our company name.
The hijackers' ads led to bing.com, not to our domain, and a disapproved ad may drop out of the archive. That's why searching for our own domain showed nothing.
Where a hijack actually shows
Change history in Google Ads lists changes to your account, campaigns and ad groups for the past 2 years, and its User column shows the email address of whoever made a change through the Google Ads interface.
Look there for campaigns, budgets and tracking templates you didn't set up, then follow our steps for a hacked Google Ads account. For the tracking template side, see our tracking template guide.
How stopfakeclicks catches it
Account guard checks your Google Ads account every hour through a script in your own account. A new campaign, a budget that jumps, ads that lead to a site your account hasn't used, or a tracking template that sends clicks to such a site: each one is paused until you confirm it was you.
Tracking template checks need the script copied from your dashboard on or after 17 October 2026.
Account guard is part of the one $9.99 plan, together with click fraud protection.