How to Find the Creators Your Competitors Are Paying

Almost everything you want to know about a competitor's creator program is public, and the fastest route to it is the Meta Ad Library: partnership ads carry the creator's handle, and an ad that has been running for three months is a creator whose content is converting well enough to keep paying for. Discount codes, branded content tags and affiliate directories fill in the rest.

An afternoon of this produces two things: a sourcing list of creators already proven in your category, and — more valuable — a read on which formats and offers your competitor has decided are worth scaling.

The sources, ranked by what they reveal

Source	What it shows	Cost	Reliability
Meta Ad Library	Every active Facebook/Instagram ad, including partnership ads with the creator's handle and the date the ad started running	Free	Highest — it is a legal disclosure, not an estimate
TikTok's ad and commercial content libraries	Active TikTok ads; the EU disclosure library is the more complete of the two	Free	High
Discount code search	Search "BRAND15" or "code BRAND" on TikTok, Instagram and Google; coupon aggregators list creator codes with the creator named	Free	High, and it reveals the offer structure
Branded content / "Paid partnership with" tags	Instagram requires the tag on paid posts; search the competitor's tagged posts and mentions	Free	Medium — compliance is imperfect
Affiliate storefronts (LTK, ShopMy, Amazon storefronts, TikTok Shop)	Creators who list the competitor's products, often with commission-level detail	Free	Medium-high in retail categories
Hashtag sweeps: #gifted, #brandpartner, #ambassador plus the brand name	Gifting and ambassador tiers that never become ads	Free	Medium — noisy, but it surfaces the unpaid tier
The competitor's own tagged feed and ambassador application page	Who they have formalised; the application page tells you their offer	Free	High for structure, low for completeness

Start with the ad library and spend most of your time there. It is the only source that tells you what a competitor is spending money on right now rather than what they did once.

Read the ads for the offer, not just the names

A list of handles is the least interesting output of this exercise. The pattern in the ads is the interesting part, and there are four things to extract deliberately:

Duration. Every ad in the Meta library shows a start date. A partnership ad still running 90 days after it launched is a validated creative — a brand does not keep paying to serve a losing ad. Sort your competitor's ads by longevity and you have their winners, in order.

Whether they whitelist at all. If their creator posts never appear as ads, they are buying organic posts only and leaving the amplification on the table — which is both a gap you can exploit and a sign they may not be measuring properly. If almost every creator post appears as a partnership ad, they are running a mature program and their rates are probably above market in your category. The mechanics are in creator whitelisting and Spark Ads.

Offer structure. A discount code with a personalised prefix and no expiry usually means an affiliate arrangement. A single campaign-wide code with a two-week window means a flat-fee burst. That distinction tells you what your own pitch is competing against when you email the same creator.

Tier and volume. Count the distinct creators across a quarter. Ten creators with heavy paid amplification behind each is a completely different strategy from 200 gifted creators and no ad spend, and the two are beaten in different ways.

What to do with the names

Sort every creator you find into three buckets:

1. Approach. They post your category well, they are not currently in an exclusivity window you can detect, and their competitor content is more than 90 days old. These are your highest-probability outreach targets, because they have proven both that they will work with a brand like yours and that the content converts.
2. Avoid for now. They posted a direct competitor in the last 90 days. Most brands draw the line there, and so should you — the audience notices, and your post reads as paid rather than genuine. Diarise them instead of discarding them.
3. Learn from, don't book. The creators who post every brand in the category every month. Their content is useful as a format reference; their endorsement carries very little.

Two cautions before you email anyone in bucket one. First, ask directly about exclusivity in the first exchange — "are you currently under any category exclusivity?" is a normal question and saves a wasted negotiation. Second, do not lead with the fact that you found them through a competitor's ads. It is public information and there is nothing improper about using it, but as an opening line it makes the pitch about the competitor rather than about them.

Everything in this list still needs the ordinary checks: audience quality, real engagement, whether their sponsored content underperforms their organic. Competitor validation tells you a brand paid them; it does not tell you the brand was right. Run the same pass you would on any cold name — the checklist in how to vet influencers does not get shorter because someone else paid them first.

Make it a quarterly habit, not a one-off

The value compounds when you repeat it. Run the same sweep every quarter and record what changed:

• Creators who appeared once and never again — the competitor tested them and stopped.
• Creators who have been running continuously for two or more quarters — their ambassadors, whatever they call them.
• New formats appearing across several creators at once — a brief change worth understanding.
• Codes that vanish — an affiliate program being wound down, or a creator relationship ending.

Half an hour a quarter against your three closest competitors gives you a picture of the category no discovery tool sells, because it is built on what people actually paid for rather than on follower counts.

The tedious half is keeping it. A list of 60 competitor-sourced creators is only useful if next quarter you can see who you already emailed, who replied, what they quoted, and which of them are now in a competitor's ads again. That is the workflow CreatorCast is built for — discovery, outreach from your own inbox, deal terms, content approval and payouts tracked per creator — so a research sweep turns into a pipeline instead of another spreadsheet tab nobody opens.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to research a competitor's influencers? Yes. Ad libraries, disclosure tags and public posts are published deliberately, much of it under regulatory requirements. What is not acceptable is misrepresenting who you are to obtain private information, or scraping behind a login in breach of a platform's terms.

Can I poach a creator who works with a competitor? You can approach anyone. Whether they can accept depends on their exclusivity terms, which is why you ask in the first email. The convention most brands follow is a 90-day gap between direct-competitor posts, and creators who care about their audience apply it themselves.

What if my competitors run no ads at all? Then the ad library is empty and the discount-code and branded-content routes do the work instead. An absence of partnership ads is itself a finding: they are buying organic posts only, and you can outperform them on the same creator by licensing the content and running it as paid.

How many competitors should I track? Three to five direct ones. Beyond that the sweep stops being a half-hour habit and starts being a project, and the marginal names come from brands your buyers do not actually consider.