You can see a rival's App Store ads. Apple publishes them. What you cannot see is the number that decides everything: their conversion rate. You will never know how many taps that ad turned into installs.
There is one honest signal you can read for free, though, and it sits right in the public data. How long each ad has run. Nobody keeps paying to run an ad that loses money. A creative that has been live for months is a creative that pays for itself, because the alternative is a marketer burning budget on a loser and not noticing for half a year. That does not happen. Longevity is the closest free proxy you have for "this ad works."
So the single most useful move is counterintuitive: ignore the newest ad. Sort a rival's ads by age and study the oldest one still live.
Why the oldest ad is the one that matters
The newest ad tells you what a competitor is guessing at this week. The oldest ad still running tells you what they already proved. One is a hypothesis. The other is a result they have kept funding through every budget review since.
Here is the difference in live data, pulled from Apple's public Ad Repository across five EU markets.
Cal AI, the AI calorie scanner, runs 20 distinct App Store creatives. That is the most in its category. But it drops each one after about three weeks: its longest-held creative in the window lasted 22 days, then got cycled out. On 3 February it launched the same concept in five languages on the same day (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch), ran all of them for 22 days, and rotated the whole set. That is an app testing fast to find a winner. It has not found one yet. Do not copy those ads. You would be copying somebody's rough draft.
Fastic, in the same calorie category, does the opposite. It runs 10 creatives, and its best one, a Spanish line built on protein, tracking and nutrition, has run for 262 straight days. First seen 19 October, still live in July. In a channel where most advertisers swap creative every few weeks, a 262-day survivor is the loud signal. That headline converts, in that market, enough to keep paying for it for over eight months. That is the ad worth studying.
Same category, two apps, opposite readings. If you copied Cal AI's freshest creative you would be borrowing a guess. If you studied Fastic's survivor you would be reading a validated answer.
The steps
- List your three closest rivals. Not the whole category, the three whose users you actually compete for.
- Pull each one's App Store ads from the Apple Ad Repository.
- Sort every ad by days running, longest first.
- Find the oldest creative still live for each rival. Read its headline and its placement (search results or product page). That combination is what your category has already validated with real money.
- Write your first creative against the survivor, not against a blank page. Match the angle, then try to beat it.
- Recheck monthly. Apple refreshes the data, so a new long-runner climbing the list is a rival finding a fresh winner. That is your early warning.
Where longevity misleads
Longevity is a proxy, not a measured conversion rate. Read it with three checks.
A brand-new app often has no long-runners at all. That does not mean its ads fail. It means the app is early and has not had time to accumulate a 200-day creative. Judge it on its own timeline, not against an incumbent's.
A big brand sometimes runs brand ads that were never meant to be performance-optimized. A creative kept live for a year might be running on brand budget, not because it wins on install cost. If the advertiser is a household name, weigh that before you copy their angle.
And a survivor tells you an ad works in its market, not why. Fastic's Spanish line wins in Spain. Test whether the same angle carries to yours before you commit the budget.
See it for your rivals
Recao pulls any advertiser's App Store ads and sorts them by how long each has survived, free, no account. Type a rival's name and read its oldest live creative in about a minute.
Start with one competitor at recao.app.
Method note: figures above are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), EU storefronts, data window ending 9 July 2026. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across markets. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate.