Guides · For builders
API for competitive intelligence reports on a company's ads, traffic and tech stack
Last updated November 11, 2026Vendor docs checked November 11, 20269 sourcesBy Every Signal
No single primary source returns all three. Ads come from the platforms' own libraries, and only Meta's has a public API, with spend limited to political ads and coverage of ordinary brands limited to ads that reached the EU. Traffic comes from modeled estimates sold by Similarweb, Semrush and DataForSEO. Tech stacks come from scanners such as BuiltWith and Wappalyzer, priced per domain looked up.
Every Signal's REST API stitches the public parts together: one intel_report job returns a company's tracking stack, its live Meta ads, its search footprint and its homepage with a machine summary, for 490 prepaid credits ($49). Below is what each source can and cannot give you, then the Every Signal endpoints with a curl example.
Ads
What ad data can an API get, and from where?
From each platform's developer documentation, November 11, 2026, linked in the table.
| Source | What it returns | What it does not |
|---|---|---|
| Meta Ad Library API | The ads_archive endpoint searches ads by page, keyword and country. Each ad carries its creative, start and stop dates, the platforms it ran on and the landing link. For ads delivered to the EU it adds total reach and, for UK and EU ads, age, gender and location targeting. | Ads that did not reach any EU location are returned only if they are about social issues, elections or politics. Spend and impressions are reported, in ranges, only for those political and issue ads. Meta does not publish a numeric rate limit. Access needs a Meta developer account and Meta's approval process. |
| Google Ads Transparency Center | A searchable repository of advertisers and the ads they served on Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube, with verified-advertiser badges. | No general public API. Google describes API access to data about ads served in the EEA under the center's terms, and access for regulators. Everything else is read through the website. DataForSEO sells endpoints based on the Google Ads Transparency platform, desktop only, via its SERP API. |
| TikTok Commercial Content API | Ads and commercial content with reach (unique users), first and last shown dates and who paid. Apply through a TikTok for Developers account; approval takes about two working days. | Data from 32 European countries only (the EU, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, the UK and Switzerland). No US ads. Ads are kept while running plus one year. |
So for a US brand, the public record of its ads is the creative, the start date and where it lands. That is enough to count active ads, rank them by run length and read the offer: the Meta ads guide does it by hand, and analyze_ads and intel_report do it by machine.
Traffic
What traffic data can an API get?
All of it is modeled. No vendor sees a competitor's analytics; each builds estimates from panels, clickstream data, search volumes and click-through models.
| Source | What it returns | Access and price |
|---|---|---|
| Similarweb API | Website Traffic API: visits, engagement, ranks, channel mix (organic search, paid search, direct, display ads, email, referrals, social), demographics, with history back 37 months depending on subscription. Also Search Keywords, Mobile Apps, Technologies and Batch APIs. 10 requests a second. | Sold inside customized business packages, or standalone through sales, on a data-credit model. No self-serve API price is published. |
| DataForSEO Labs | Bulk traffic estimation returns estimated organic and paid search traffic for up to 1,000 targets per call. The docs say the figure is the product of a click-through rate and search volume, so it is a search-traffic estimate, not total visits. | Pay as you go, no subscription, $50 minimum top-up, $1 trial credit, balance never expires. Labs calls start at $0.012 per task plus $0.00012 per item. |
| Semrush API | Standard API access comes with a Business subscription and separately bought API units. The separate Trends API returns visits, unique visits, pages per visit, duration, device share and bounce rate for up to 200 domains a request; the Premium tier adds sources, geography, top pages and demographics. | Unit packages and Trends Premium are sold through Semrush; dollar prices for the API are not on the public page. Check current pricing. |
Two vendors can disagree a lot. In one Every Signal record, September 2026 visits for the same site were given as 4.5M-8.9M visits (Similarweb vs Semrush)
, about a 2x gap, and tagged estimate. idrlabs Quote the vendor and the month with every traffic figure you store.
Tech stack
What tech stack data can an API get?
Tech stack lookups are the most reliable of the three, because they read what the page actually loads. The caveats are freshness and depth: most APIs serve a cached scan, and a homepage scan can miss tools that only fire in checkout.
| Source | What it returns | Access and price |
|---|---|---|
| BuiltWith Domain API | Current and historical technologies for a domain with confidence scores. One credit per domain. Up to 8 concurrent requests and 10 a second. | Plans Basic $295, Pro $495 and Team $995 a month; the Team plan includes 100,000 API credits a month. Single lookups on the website are free. |
| Wappalyzer Lookup API | Technologies for 1 to 10 URLs per request, 1 credit per URL (5 for a live, recursive scan). Results are cached by default, up to 2 months old unless you pass live=true. 10 requests a second. | Pro $250, Business $450, Enterprise from $850 a month; a free account gets 50 lookups a month. Plan credits expire after 60 days. Its open-source fingerprints went private in August 2023; a GPL fork, webappanalyzer, continues them. |
| DataForSEO Domain Technologies | Technologies for a domain, and domains by technology. | $0.012 per task on the same pay-as-you-go balance as its other APIs. |
| Every Signal tracking scan | A logged-out browser scan matched against 250+ tracking, ad, attribution, affiliate and analytics tools, with pixel and account IDs where visible. | Inside the $49 intelligence report, the $10 landing page analysis or a teardown. Not a standalone lookup. |
One API
What does Every Signal's REST API return?
The base URL is https://everysignal.com/api/v1. Every request except the catalog and the public report list carries Authorization: Bearer es_..., with a key from /app/keys. The spec is OpenAPI 3.1 at /api/v1/openapi.json; the same tools are on the MCP server (/connect/).
| Endpoint | What it does | Key |
|---|---|---|
| GET /catalog | Prices, packs and job kinds as JSON. | No |
| POST /jobs | Start a job. Body: kind, input, optional webhook_url. Credits are debited now and refunded if the job fails. Returns 202 with the job, or 402 if the balance is short. | Yes |
| GET /jobs, GET /jobs/{id} | Your recent jobs; one job's status and, when done, its result. | Yes |
| POST /kb/{tool} | Call a knowledge-base tool: kb_sectors, kb_brief, kb_playbook free; kb_search, kb_examples, kb_benchmarks, kb_get 1 credit each. | Yes |
| GET /reports, GET /reports/{slug} | Published teardowns: the list with public summaries needs no key; one report returns full text with library access, else the public part. | List no, report yes |
| GET /balance | Credit balance and recent ledger. | Yes |
Job kinds and what they cost
| kind | Input | Output | Credits | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| intel_report | A company URL | Tracking stack, live Meta ads, search footprint, homepage, machine summary against its sector. 6 to 12 minutes. | 490 | $49 |
| analyze_ads | Up to 10 creatives, or a brand name | Each creative scored against real ad patterns; fixes and new hooks. | 150 | $15 |
| growth_audit | A domain | Ranked keywords, an organic traffic estimate tagged as such, AI-answer footprint, tracking, a ranked growth plan. | 150 | $15 |
| analyze_landing_page | A public URL | Stack and pixels, funnel steps, copy against sector patterns, ranked fixes, hero rewrite. | 100 | $10 |
| audit_work | Copy or a URL plus the sector | Score, findings with record ids, fixes, rewrite. About 40 seconds. | 30 | $3 |
1 credit is $0.10. Packs are 100 credits for $10, 550 for $50 and 3,000 for $250; credits never expire and the first key on a verified email gets 50 free. Limits are 60 calls a minute per key (calls over the limit get a 429 and are not charged) and 5 running jobs per key.
A curl example: order an intelligence report
terminal
curl -s https://everysignal.com/api/v1/jobs \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"kind":"intel_report","input":{"url":"https://example.com","sector":"subscription-apps"}}'The response is the queued job with its id. Poll it, or let the server call you:
terminal
curl -s https://everysignal.com/api/v1/jobs/JOB_ID -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY"
If you pass webhook_url (https only), Every Signal POSTs job.done or job.failed to it, signed with an Every-Signal-Signature header. A knowledge-base call is one request and returns at once:
terminal
curl -s https://everysignal.com/api/v1/kb/kb_benchmarks \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"funnel":"paywall","sector":"subscription-apps"}'That returns measured step-to-step rates for the paywall funnel in that sector, each with its sample size, period, source and evidence tag; the median uses only verified values.
Honest limits
What can no API give you?
A US competitor's ad spend
Meta publishes spend only for political and issue ads, Google has no public API outside the EEA, and TikTok's library is European. Any estimated spend
for a US brand is modeled. Every Signal ranks ads by days running times versions instead and tags that ranking inferred.
Real visit counts
Every traffic API is an estimate. Every Signal has no traffic panel of its own; its reports cite Similarweb and Semrush as a range and tag them estimate. For the comparison with a traffic tool, read Every Signal vs Similarweb.
A competitor's conversion rate or revenue
No scanner sees either. The only conversion sources are figures the company has published or rates measured in public studies; Every Signal's kb_benchmarks collects those with their records and tags. Revenue in a teardown is a sanity check built from public prices, traffic estimates and funnel observations, and press figures carry a rumour tag.
Questions
FAQ
Is there one API that returns a competitor's ads, traffic and tech stack?
No single primary source does. Ads come from the platforms' own transparency libraries, traffic from modeled estimates sold by Similarweb, Semrush or DataForSEO, and tech stacks from scanners such as BuiltWith and Wappalyzer. Every Signal's intel_report job combines a tracking-stack scan, the company's live Meta ads, its search footprint and its homepage into one JSON result for 490 credits ($49), but it does not include a traffic panel of its own.
Can the Meta Ad Library API tell me what a US competitor spends on ads?
No. Meta's archived-ad fields report spend and impressions, in ranges, only for ads about social issues, elections or politics. For an ordinary US brand the API returns ads only if they reached the EU, and even then without spend. What is public for every ad is the creative, the start date, the platforms and the landing page, so run length and version count are the usual proxies for a winning ad.
Are API traffic numbers for a competitor accurate?
They are estimates from panels and models, not server logs. Different vendors can disagree by about two times for the same site in the same month, as one Every Signal record found when Similarweb and Semrush were compared. Treat any traffic figure from an API as an estimate, quote the source and the month, and use the trend rather than the absolute number where you can.
How do I call the Every Signal API from code?
Create a key at everysignal.com/app/keys, then POST JSON to https://everysignal.com/api/v1/jobs with an Authorization: Bearer header, a kind such as intel_report and an input object with the company URL. The response is a job; poll GET /api/v1/jobs/{id} or pass a webhook_url. Knowledge-base tools are POST /api/v1/kb/{tool}. The OpenAPI 3.1 spec is at /api/v1/openapi.json and prices are at /api/v1/catalog, which needs no key.
What does an Every Signal API report cost compared with a human teardown?
An automated intelligence report is 490 prepaid credits, $49, with a machine summary and no analyst review. A custom teardown read by a person before it ships is $495 for a data snapshot, $1,500 for a quick teardown and $4,000 for a deep one. Credits are $0.10 each in packs from $10, never expire, and the first key on a verified email gets 50 free.