Comparison
AdSpy is the biggest name in Facebook ad spying — a searchable database of millions of ads. It's excellent at finding what's running. It has no idea which of those ads actually work.
AdSpy indexes a huge library of Facebook and Instagram ads and makes them searchable in ways the free Meta Ad Library can't match.
If your job is finding what's live, AdSpy does it. Keep it.
AdSpy will hand you 500 ads for your niche and rank them by engagement or recency. AdSpy, like every ad spy tool, is a database: it shows you an ad exists and, at best, how long it's run. It cannot tell you whether the creative actually holds a viewer's attention — which is the only thing that decides whether an ad is worth copying. That's not a knock on AdSpy; no database can see inside the creative. It's a different layer.
AdSpy is the card catalog — every ad indexed, none of them read. PreTestAds is the librarian who read them all. Point an AI agent with the PreTestAds MCP at any advertiser and it scores each live ad for predicted attention, then hands back a verdict on every one:
The verdict a spy database can't give you
HIDDEN GEM
Great creative nobody's backing — steal it early
MODEL IT
Proven winner — copy the structure
SKIP
Nothing to learn or beat
OUT-HOOK IT
They're committed to weak creative — beat it
Creative attention score →
Run time fools everyone — a long-running ad looks like a winner and is often just coasting on autopilot budget. A score doesn't guess (more in how to tell if a competitor ad is working).
Use AdSpy to surface the candidates, then score the shortlist so you model the ads that hold attention, not the ones that merely ran a long time. See it in practice on 7 real competitor ads we pulled and scored, or read the honest landscape in best Facebook ad spy tools.
Score any competitor ad for attention before you model it. First analysis free.
Score an AdNot exactly — they do different jobs. AdSpy is a searchable database of live Facebook and Instagram ads; you use it to find what competitors run. PreTestAds scores whether a given ad's creative holds attention. Most people use AdSpy to find ads and PreTestAds to judge which ones are worth copying.
No. AdSpy shows engagement metrics and how long an ad has run, but it can't see spend, sales, or whether the creative holds a viewer's attention. Long run time is a weak proxy for success that misleads as often as it helps.
A judgment layer. Point an AI agent with the PreTestAds MCP at ads you found in AdSpy and it scores each for predicted attention, then verdicts them model / out-hook / hidden gem / skip — so you copy the genuinely strong ones instead of the long-running duds.