Most Apple Search Ads accounts start blind. You pick keywords, guess a headline, set a bid, then spend two or three weeks paying for the answer. You do not have to. Apple publishes every App Store ad it runs in the EU, including the placement and how long each one has stayed live. So before your own budget touches the auction, you can read which creatives your rivals kept funding and which they dropped. Here is the step by step.
Step 1: Find the competitor in Apple's public Ad Repository
Open the Apple Ad Repository at adrepository.apple.com. Search the rival app or developer name. Apple returns an entity ID for that advertiser. This is the same data Apple is required to publish under the EU Digital Services Act, so it covers any app running App Store ads in an EU or UK storefront.
Step 2: Pull their ads
Query that entity ID for ads. You get back one record per creative, per country, per reporting window: the headline shown, the placement, the markets, and the first and last dates Apple recorded the ad running. A busy advertiser returns hundreds of near-duplicate rows, because Apple splits one creative across every country and date window it appeared in. To read it, you dedupe by creative and stitch each creative's rows into a single first-to-last span.
Step 3: Sort by how long each ad has run
This is the step that turns raw records into a decision. Rank every creative by its survival time, longest first. An ad a competitor has kept live for months is an ad that pays for itself, because nobody keeps funding a creative that loses money. Longevity is your read on which copy converts, arrived at without spending on your own test. You are looking at your rival's A/B results after the fact.
Step 4: Read the placement before you compare anything
App Store ads run in two different slots, and mixing them will mislead you. Search results is the slot shown after someone types a query. The search tab is the browse surface shown before a query, when the user has typed nothing. These are different intent. A search-results ad reaches someone already looking; a search-tab ad interrupts someone browsing. Their cost per acquisition is not comparable, so never judge one against the other. Note which slot each surviving ad ran in, and plan your own placement to match the intent you want.
Step 5: Read the localization
Look at whether a creative ran in one market or several, and whether the copy changed by country. When an advertiser runs the same line across multiple markets for months, that line has cleared the bar in more than one auction. When they change the angle by country, they are telling you the pitch that wins in one market is not the pitch that wins in another. Both signals are copy direction you would otherwise pay to discover.
Step 6: Model your first ads on the survivors
Take the creatives at the top of your survival ranking, the ones past 60 or 90 days, and write your first ads against those angles. You are not copying a headline word for word. You are starting from a value proposition your category has already validated with real money, instead of a blank page.
A worked example: language learning
Here is what the method returns for two language-learning apps, pulled from the Apple Ad Repository, data window ending 8 July 2026.
- Busuu was running 14 distinct App Store creatives, 8 of them live 30 days or more, the longest running 215 days. That is an account that tests steadily and keeps its winners. The 215-day survivor is the angle to study first, because Busuu has funded it through more than seven months of auctions.
- Pimsleur ran the same creative, "Learn Spanish, French & German", across 4 markets, live 68 days. When one advertiser runs the identical line in several countries for months, that line is a validated starting point for your own copy. You did not run a single test to learn it.
- In this category, the sustained ads ran in App Store search results, the slot after someone types a query, not the search tab. If you sell a language app, that tells you where the durable spend sits: buying intent from people already searching, not interrupting browsers.
Read those three facts together and you have a first plan before spending: bid on search results, lead with the concrete "Spanish, French & German" style breadth that Pimsleur kept live, and treat Busuu's 215-day creative as the angle to beat.
Do this before you set bids
Pull your three closest competitors. Rank their ads by survival time, split by placement, and read the localization. The long-runners are the angles worth your first budget. Then check back monthly, because Apple refreshes the repository and a new long-runner is a rival finding a new winner.
Start with one competitor now at recao.app. Free scan, no signup, results in about a minute.
Method note: figures above are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), data window ending 8 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across all markets. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate.