Strategy 25 min read

What ads are Series A companies running in 2026? A study of 7,819 companies

We took every Series A round Crunchbase recorded between September 2024 and August 2026, 7,819 companies, and looked up the 4,930 we could check (live site, outside mainland China) in the public Google, Meta and LinkedIn ad libraries. 51.4% have ads. Here is who does, on which platform, how it moves with round size and time, and what the ads and landing pages look like.

The short version

  • 51.4% of Series A companies have ads in the public libraries: 2,533 of the 4,930 companies checked on all three, 2,383 of them confirmed and 150 Google index advertisers whose ads we couldn't pull. On the same companies, stricter definitions give 46.6% to 51.5%; the sensitivity table shows why.
  • Google 38.1%, LinkedIn 32.2%, Meta 10.6%. Same order as the YC portfolio. For B2B companies, LinkedIn (36%) and Google (33.6%) are close to equal channels.
  • Website traffic is the tightest correlate we found: 23.9% of companies under 1,000 monthly visits advertise, 88.9% above 200,000. Headcount is next: 35.6% at 1 to 10 people, 69.7% at 101 to 250.
  • Round size is an inverted U. $10-20M rounds advertise most (61.8%); $75M+ rounds advertise least (37.9%). Time since the round adds little once round size is held constant.
  • Most Series A ads land on an existing page. Of Meta and LinkedIn advertisers, 17.6% send most clicks to the homepage and 1.9% to a purpose-built campaign page. Only 3.7% of advertisers lead with a demo button.

51.4% have ads, and Google comes first

Of the 4,930 companies we checked on all three libraries (raised a Series A between September 2024 and August 2026, live website, still operating, headquartered outside mainland China), 51.4% have at least one ad in the Google, Meta or LinkedIn ad libraries. 2,383 are confirmed. The other 150 sit in Google's advertiser index but their ads were never pulled (our scraping budget ran out); we count them as advertisers because 99% of the Google advertisers we did pull qualified. Without them the figure is 48.3%.

Each library keeps a different window, and it matters. Meta shows only ads that are active now. LinkedIn keeps roughly the last twelve months. Google's Transparency Center is an archive, so for Google we count a company only if one of its ads was shown in the last twelve months; 76% of those also had an ad shown in the last 30 days, which puts the "Google right now" figure near 28.8%. LinkedIn dates only 38.0% of its advertisers' ads; among those, 55.1% had one shown in the last 30 days. Read every number in this piece as "has ads in the library," a floor on "has ever advertised" and a ceiling on "is spending this week."

When Series A companies advertise, the platform order is:

  • 38.1% have Google ads (shown in the last 12 months; 28.3% confirmed, 38.3% counting any presence in the index)
  • 32.2% have LinkedIn ads
  • 10.6% have active Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram)
Google first, LinkedIn second, Meta third

Company-weighted: share of companies, of the 4,930 companies checked on all three libraries. Each library keeps a different window; the label says which.

Google (shown in last 12 months, incl. 482 unpulled index advertisers)38.1%
Google (shown in last 12 months, confirmed only)28.3%
Google (shown in last 30 days)28.8%
LinkedIn (in the library, ~12 months)32.2%
Meta (active now)10.6%

Because the headline depends on the pool and the definition, here is how it moves:

How you define the poolCompaniesAdvertise
As published: checked on all three libraries, Google unknowns imputed4,93051.4%
Confirmed advertisers only (excludes the 482 Google advertisers whose pull never ran)4,93048.3%
Same rule as the YC study (any presence in a library)4,93051.5%
Counting the 511 unchecked companies as non-advertisers5,44146.6%
Rounds of $1M or more only4,16554.8%
Rounds of $5M or more only3,48557.6%
Undisclosed round size only51441.4%
United States only2,31855.3%

Look at how many rely on a single channel and the order holds. 12.8% have only Google, 11.8% only LinkedIn, and 1.1% only Meta. The most common combination is Google plus LinkedIn (799 companies), then Google plus Meta (260); 184 companies run all three. That's the shape you'd expect from a pool that is 77.7% B2B.

Used as the only paid channel

Company-weighted: share of companies

Google only12.8%
LinkedIn only11.8%
Meta only1.1%

Meta rarely stands alone here. It shows up on top of Google, mostly at consumer companies, not as a starting point. One reading is that a company selling to businesses reaches for the channels that capture existing demand (search) or reach a job title (LinkedIn) before it pays to create demand on social. We only see who runs what today, not the order they got there, so treat that as interpretation.

Series A companies vs the YC portfolio

Two months ago we ran the same method over the Y Combinator portfolio, 4,767 companies with a live site. Same libraries, same rules for what counts as an advertiser. The YC study counted any presence in a library, so the comparison below uses that rule for both.

Series A companies vs the YC portfolio (same rule: any presence in the library)
Any platform51.5%
44.5%
Google38.3%
33.7%
LinkedIn32.2%
23.6%
Meta10.6%
8.3%
Series A (this study)YC companies (July 2026)

Series A companies come out at 51.5% against YC's 44.5%, and the platform order is the same. That is mostly composition rather than a fact about the round: a Series A company is bigger and more B2B than the median YC company, and headcount predicts advertising in both studies, so the gap has to be there. The two pools also overlap (YC companies that raised a Series A in the window are in both).

The clearest difference is LinkedIn: 32.2% of Series A companies against 23.6% of YC companies. YC has a long consumer and marketplace tail; a 2025 and 2026 Series A list is dominated by B2B software, infrastructure, security and health, and those are the buyers LinkedIn reaches. Some of the gap could also be the two months between the studies, since LinkedIn matching is the most method-sensitive of the three. Meta is higher here (10.6% against 8.3%), which fits a pool with a paid budget and a smaller consumer share.

Round size is an inverted U, and time since the round adds little

A Series A is a moment, not a cohort, and Crunchbase gives us the date and the amount for every round. So we can ask two things the YC study couldn't: does advertising rise after the round, and does a bigger round mean more advertising?

On the first question the plain read is flat: companies that raised in the last three months have ads at 53%, companies 19 to 24 months out at 50.2%. But the recent cohorts are richer (Crunchbase logs big rounds fast and back-fills small ones for months), so the flat line mixes two effects. Holding round size roughly constant, rounds of $5M and up, the curve is 56.8% in the first three months, peaks at 60% at 13-18 months, and eases to 56.5% by two years.

Advertising by months since the Series A

Company-weighted: share of companies. Recent cohorts skew to larger rounds, so the $5M+ line controls for that. Buckets are 3, 3, 6, 6 and 6 months wide.

0-3 months53%
56.8%
4-6 months51.7%
53.8%
7-12 months52.5%
58.3%
13-18 months50.9%
60%
19-24 months50.2%
56.5%
All roundsRounds of $5M+ only

Two cautions. This is a cross-section, not the same companies followed over time, so it can't show any one company switching ads on. And the 0 to 3 month bucket is the one Crunchbase has recorded least completely (only 38.9% of the August 2026 rounds made it into our checked pool), which skews it toward larger, better-covered companies. On this evidence we can't see the round acting as a switch; if it does, the cohorts that raised most recently already look like the ones that raised two years ago.

Round size is the more interesting axis, because it isn't a straight line:

Advertising by round size

Company-weighted: share of companies; company counts in brackets

<$1M (251)15.1%
$1-5M (680)40.6%
$5-10M (865)55.4%
$10-20M (1,317)61.8%
$20-40M (856)60.5%
$40-75M (270)47.4%
$75M+ (177)37.9%
undisclosed (514)41.4%
All51.4%

$10-20M rounds have ads most often, at 61.8%. Below $1M it's 15.1%, and at $1M to $5M 40.6%. Those small rounds are not mainly a foreign labelling quirk: the largest block of sub-$5M rounds is American (268 companies, 24.3% with ads), alongside South Korea (21.7%) and Japan (26.8%), while sub-$5M rounds in India (55.5%) and Europe (47%) advertise about as often as the pool. Above $75M the rate drops to 37.9%: the mega-round Series A of 2025 and 2026 is usually an AI lab, a fusion company, a chip startup or a defense contractor, and about one in five of them (22%) runs Google ads. Rounds with no disclosed amount (514 companies) sit at 41.4%.

The median advertiser raised $13M against $10M for the median non-advertiser; the means run the other way ($20M against $24M) because the mega-rounds sit on the non-advertising side.

Platform by round size

Company-weighted: share of companies

<$5M25.5%
13.9%
10.8%
$5-10M41.2%
32.6%
14.1%
$10-20M48.5%
41.8%
11.2%
$20-40M43.6%
42.6%
9.3%
$40-75M27.8%
34.8%
5.2%
$75M+22%
27.1%
4.5%
GoogleLinkedInMeta

The platform mix moves with round size too. Google is strongest in the $5M to $40M bands. LinkedIn holds its share further up the range, which fits: the $40M-plus companies that advertise are selling to enterprises.

Traffic, headcount and sector predict it

Inside a single funding stage, the things that predicted advertising across the YC portfolio predict it here, and one new one predicts it better than any of them.

Advertising by monthly website visits

Company-weighted: share of companies; Semrush estimate via Crunchbase; company counts in brackets

<1k (1,500)23.9%
1k-10k (1,638)54.5%
10k-50k (824)74.8%
50k-200k (407)86%
200k+ (316)88.9%
unknown (245)14.3%
All51.4%

Website traffic has the widest spread of any cut we made. 23.9% of companies with under 1,000 monthly visits (Semrush's estimate, via Crunchbase) have ads; 74.8% at 10,000 to 50,000; 88.9% above 200,000. Some of that traffic is the ads themselves, so this runs in both directions and we can't say which came first. What it does say is that the companies advertising are the ones that already have an audience, far more than the ones that just raised.

Advertising by headcount

Company-weighted: share of companies; Crunchbase headcount band, company counts in brackets

1-10 (842)35.6%
11-50 (2,644)50.2%
51-100 (753)65.1%
101-250 (455)69.7%
251-500 (75)72%
501-1000 (27)59.3%
1001+ (22)54.5%
unknown (112)16.1%
All51.4%

Headcount is next. A company with 1 to 10 people has ads 35.6% of the time, at 51 to 100 it's 65.1%, at 101 to 250 it's 69.7%. Past 250 the sample is small (under 130 companies) and the rate stops rising; several of those "Series A" companies with 500-plus staff look like growth rounds carrying an early-stage label. Headcount is a proxy for having a go-to-market team at all: someone has to own the ad account. Companies whose headcount Crunchbase doesn't know (112) advertise at 16.1%; every "unknown" bucket in this study sits low, which says enrichment gaps and detection gaps travel together.

Advertising by sector

Company-weighted: share of companies; all 12 sectors shown

Security (262)72.9%
B2B Software (799)68.5%
Real Estate & Construction (166)68.1%
Education (73)65.8%
Developer Tools & Infra (244)61.5%
Consumer (563)58.4%
Fintech (614)57.3%
AI (208)50%
Climate & Energy (380)39.7%
Healthcare & Bio (937)35.8%
Hardware & Deep Tech (478)31.2%
Other (206)31.1%
All51.4%

By sector, Security leads at 72.9%, with B2B Software (68.5%) and Real Estate & Construction (68.1%) close behind. At the bottom sit Hardware & Deep Tech (31.2%) and Healthcare & Bio (35.8%). Healthcare & Bio is the largest sector in the pool and one of the least likely to advertise, which pulls the overall number down. One label needs care: "AI" here means companies whose product is AI itself (models, infrastructure, horizontal agents), 208 companies; a security company built on AI is filed under Security. That residual AI bucket advertises at 50%, about average.

Platform by sector

Company-weighted: share of companies

Security53.4%
61.1%
1.1%
B2B Software56.2%
48.8%
9.8%
Real Estate & Construction54.2%
39.8%
16.3%
Education52.1%
37%
17.8%
Developer Tools & Infra45.5%
48.4%
2.5%
Consumer50.1%
13%
33%
Fintech43.6%
33.9%
12.5%
AI33.7%
34.6%
5.3%
Climate & Energy19.5%
30.8%
6.6%
Healthcare & Bio24.2%
22%
7.7%
Hardware & Deep Tech18.2%
23.2%
1.9%
Other19.4%
18%
6.8%
GoogleLinkedInMeta

The platform split by sector says who each channel is for. Consumer companies run Google at 50.1% and LinkedIn at 13%; Security companies run LinkedIn at 61.1%, the highest of any sector.

Platform by business model

Company-weighted: share of companies

B2B (3,829)33.6%
36%
5%
B2C (814)54.1%
16.6%
32.6%
Both (287)51.9%
24.7%
22.3%
GoogleLinkedInMeta

Cut by business model, B2C companies have ads more often than B2B (62.9% against 48.2%), and the channel flips: B2C is Google at 54.1% and LinkedIn at 16.6%; B2B is Google at 33.6% and LinkedIn at 36%. For a B2B company at this stage, LinkedIn is not the channel you add later; it's already level with search.

One more cut: the 100 largest rounds in the pool (everything from $101M up, and at the very top "Series A" is a Crunchbase label rather than a stage). 36% of them have ads, Google 21% and LinkedIn 25%. YC's top 100 by lifetime funding advertised at 72%, but that ranks companies that have had a decade to build a growth function; this ranks single rounds, most of them raised by pre-product frontier bets.

By region: the US, Europe and the UK are close; Japan and Korea are not

The pool is global, and the ad libraries are global, so regions can be compared on the same footing. Sample sizes vary a lot; the company count is in brackets, and the country table lists countries with at least 45 checked companies.

Advertising by region

Company-weighted: share of companies; regions with at least 15 checked companies

Latin America (97)64.9%
Canada (100)63%
India (311)58.5%
Israel (88)58%
United States (2,318)55.3%
Rest of world (122)54.1%
Europe (excl. UK) (696)53.4%
Middle East & Africa (106)52.8%
Australia & NZ (87)51.7%
Hong Kong (28)50%
United Kingdom (323)49.2%
SE Asia (122)41.8%
Japan (229)27.5%
South Korea (287)22.6%
China (1,042)5.5%
All (excl. mainland China)51.4%

United States companies have ads at 55.3%, Europe outside the UK at 53.4%, the UK at 49.2%. Latin America (97 companies) has the highest rate of any region with a meaningful sample at 64.9%, though on that sample the interval overlaps the US. Japan (27.5%) and South Korea (22.6%) are low, and low specifically on LinkedIn (7.9% and 5.9%), which fits how little LinkedIn is used in either market.

Mainland China is the reason the headline pool excludes it: 5.5% of the 1,042 Chinese Series A companies we checked show up in these three libraries. Their ads run on platforms with no public library (WeChat, Douyin, Baidu), so counting them would only tell you which library we looked in. Hong Kong (28 companies, 50%) stays in the pool.

CountryCompanies checkedAny platformGoogleLinkedInMeta
United States231855.3%40.4%37.5%8.8%
China10425.5%3.9%2%0.8%
United Kingdom32349.2%34.7%35.9%8.7%
India31158.5%46.3%22.5%28.9%
South Korea28722.6%17.1%5.9%4.2%
Japan22927.5%21.8%7.9%3.5%
France16950.3%36.1%34.3%8.9%
Germany16457.3%45.7%40.9%9.8%
Canada10063%44%46%13%
Israel8858%44.3%53.4%0%
Singapore8143.2%34.6%24.7%9.9%
Australia7146.5%32.4%38%14.1%
Switzerland6339.7%23.8%25.4%3.2%
Brazil5862.1%46.6%34.5%19%
The Netherlands4961.2%42.9%46.9%8.2%
Italy4555.6%44.4%28.9%26.7%

One row is missing on purpose: Crunchbase lists 119 Sri Lankan "Series A" rounds of $120,000 to $190,000 with near-identical profiles. They look like spam submissions, none of them advertises, and we dropped them from the study rather than print a 0% row. Israel's Meta column reads zero on 88 companies; we found 38 Israeli Facebook pages but none with ads that landed on the company's own domain, so treat that cell as a resolution limit as much as a behaviour.

By lead investor

Crunchbase names a lead investor on 78.9% of the rounds in the pool, so we can look at each firm's Series A companies as a portfolio. Two things to read before the table. Every interval is 24 to 44 points wide, so almost no two firms here are statistically distinguishable; read it as sector mix, not as a ranking. And a round with two named leads counts in both portfolios.

Lead investorSeries A cos in poolAdvertising95% intervalGoogleLinkedInMeta
Andreessen Horowitz35 of 5465%52-76%52%50%7%
Accel29 of 4564%50-77%44%47%11%
Lightspeed Venture Partners24 of 3667%50-80%39%47%3%
Insight Partners27 of 3577%61-88%66%57%9%
Khosla Ventures21 of 3462%45-76%44%41%9%
Sequoia Capital19 of 3161%44-76%48%42%13%
General Catalyst15 of 2952%34-69%41%38%3%
Bessemer Venture Partners19 of 2479%60-91%62%50%29%
Felicis12 of 1963%41-81%58%37%10%
Peak XV Partners14 of 1974%51-88%63%47%26%
Google Ventures10 of 1856%34-75%33%50%6%
Kleiner Perkins15 of 1883%61-94%56%56%17%
Index Ventures12 of 1771%47-87%65%65%12%
Norwest15 of 1788%66-97%59%82%12%
Bpifrance5 of 1631%14-56%19%19%0%
Redpoint15 of 1694%72-99%81%62%6%
8VC9 of 1656%33-77%38%56%12%
CDP Venture Capital6 of 1540%20-64%33%13%13%
Spark Capital9 of 1560%36-80%47%53%7%

The one pattern that survives the intervals: the two state-backed funds (Bpifrance, CDP) sit low and the firms concentrated in B2B software sit high. That is the sector and geography charts again, seen through a different lens.

The pixel question, and why we didn't build on it

Before pulling a single ad, we read each company's homepage HTML for the tracking tags the platforms hand out. We expected the gap between "tag installed" and "ads live" to be a story. It mostly turned out to be a story about the detector, so here is the honest version.

TagDetected on all pool companiesDetected on confirmed advertisers of that platformWhat that means
Meta pixel9.1%28.2%Detector finds the pixel on ~3 in 10 known Meta advertisers
LinkedIn Insight tag6.7%14.6%Finds the tag on ~1 in 7 known LinkedIn advertisers
Google tag (gtag.js)29.5%30.2%Shared with Google Analytics; not an ads signal

Reading raw HTML catches the Meta pixel on only 28.2% of companies we know are running Meta ads, and the LinkedIn Insight tag on 14.6% of known LinkedIn advertisers, because most tags load through a tag manager the raw page never shows. The Google pattern matches gtag.js, which Google Analytics also uses, so it says nothing about an ads account. With that sensitivity, the 301 companies that carry a Meta pixel but run no Meta ads are a floor on the "wired but not spending" group, and the true number is a few times larger. (270 companies' pages couldn't be read at all and count as untagged.) We're publishing the tag columns in the data file; we wouldn't build a chart on them.

What the ads look like

We pulled the ads themselves: 169,640 in all, 159,793 of them from companies in the headline pool, which is what every figure from here on uses (100,727 Google, 40,821 Meta, 18,245 LinkedIn). The libraries and our pulls cap what you can take: LinkedIn returns at most 20 ads per account (575 advertisers sit at that cap), our Meta pull stopped at 300 per page, and 78 Google advertisers were truncated by the run limits. Google's pull also covers 74.3% of Google advertisers, because the scraping budget ran out before the rest. So volume figures below are Google and Meta only, and the pooled figures lean toward large consumer accounts. Where it matters we give a company-weighted number next to the ad-weighted one.

Among the 1,593 Google or Meta advertisers whose ads we captured, the median has 24 ads in the libraries and the top tenth have 248 or more.

Meta: format mix
video37.3%
dco34.4%
image22.8%
carousel4.5%
text1%

On Facebook and Instagram, video is the largest format at 37.3% of active ads, dynamic catalog ads (product-feed ads that render a different item to each viewer) are 34.4%, static images 22.8%, carousels 4.5%.

Google: format mix
text60.2%
image20%
video19.8%

Google is different: 60.2% of Google ads are text search ads, 19.8% are video (YouTube) and 20% display images. A Series A Google account is a search account first, but two ads in five aren't search.

LinkedIn: format mix
image69.2%
video16.4%
document6.6%
message3.2%
carousel2.3%
event1%
other0.6%
spotlight0.4%
text0.3%

LinkedIn sits in between. Single images are 69.2% of LinkedIn ads, video 16.4%, document ads (the swipeable PDF format LinkedIn pushes for reports and guides) 6.6%, sponsored messages 3.2%.

We also had a vision model describe a stratified sample of the image creatives (406 Meta, 316 LinkedIn; Google's stills are mostly rendered search ads, so we leave them out here). On Meta the most common image types are product shot 28%, founder or person photo 20%, lifestyle photo 17%; 49.3% of Meta images show a human face and 51% carry heavy text. On LinkedIn: text on color 19%, event promo 16%, product screenshot 13%; 32.3% show a face, 15.2% show software or a web page, 77% carry heavy text.

How long do ads run? The libraries answer differently. Google reports the number of days an ad actually served: the median is 61 days and 10.3% of Google ads have served for more than a year. Meta only shows active ads with a start date; the median active Meta ad started 18 days ago, and 1.7% started more than six months ago. A search ad that has served for years is the closest thing a public library offers to a signal that it works, though the library never shows spend or results. Google's records begin on 2021-10-25, so anything that old is "at least" that old; the table below leaves those out and shows one ad per company. Most of the longest runners are consumer ecommerce search ads.

Google ads first shown on the library's earliest date (2021-10-25) are excluded: their true start is unknown.
CompanyPlatformDays servedFirst shownCopy
House of Chikankarigoogle1,7052021-12-06Exclusive Kurta Collection - House Of Chikankari
AKT Londongoogle1,6762022-02-08AKT | The Deodorant Balm SC.01
SKYWITHCLASSgoogle1,6432022-03-12Skywithclass - Fly First Class Affordably - Up to -70% Off
Cycloidgoogle1,6262022-02-03Cycloid Platform Engineering - Roll out platform engineering
Radical Storagegoogle1,5972022-05-02Bags Storage Milan from €0.90 - Storage in Milan Centrale
Poppy Flowersgoogle1,5782022-05-21Simple, Transparent Pricing - Low Minimums, No Hidden Fees
Oxylabsgoogle1,5552022-05-05Better Proxy Alternative - 175M+ Residential IPs
Cryptiogoogle1,5332022-02-02Track Crypto Gains & Losses - Best Crypto Tax Calculator
Camphousegoogle1,5332022-02-04Powerful Marketing Platform - #1 Media Planning Tool
Nutrabaygoogle1,5012022-07-28oO Nutrabay Premium Quality whey Protein - 100% Purchase Protection

The copy is short and literal, and one ad in ten says AI

134,020 ads carry readable copy (82,979 Google, 32,848 Meta, 18,193 LinkedIn). We excluded 7,833 Meta catalog ads whose text is a template token and 17,940 ads with no extractable text. Google's copy is read off rendered ad images, so some of it is garbled (a capital "I" often comes back as a lowercase "l", accents get lost); the word counts and matches below allow for the common substitutions, and Google copy figures should be read as good to within a few points.

The median headline is 6 words; Google and LinkedIn headlines run 7 words, Meta 5. Bodies are 16 words on Google, 33 on Meta and 52 on LinkedIn. 36% of ads say "you" or "your", 53.5% contain a digit of some kind, 14.8% use an emoji (almost all on Meta).

Questions are a Meta and LinkedIn habit, not just a long-copy effect: per 100 words of copy there are 8.58 question marks on Meta, 6.37 on LinkedIn and 4.22 on Google.

18.4% of ads mention AI (whole-word match on "AI", "artificial intelligence", "LLM", "GPT", "AI agent", "agentic" or "copilot", accepting the "Al" misread in Google's rendered text). Split by who's talking: companies whose Crunchbase categories include AI say it in 45.9% of their ads, everyone else in 5.6%. Counted by company, 55% of advertisers with readable copy have at least one ad that says AI.

Call-to-action buttons

Ad-weighted: share of ads with a button (50,708 Meta and LinkedIn ads; Google search ads have no button)

learn more30.2%
shop now24.4%
install now6.9%
book now6.4%
sign up5.7%
see details5%
download4%
order now2.9%
get quote2.3%
apply now2%

The button tells you what the company wants, with one caveat: Google search ads have no button, so this is 1,444 Meta and LinkedIn advertisers out of 1,900. Counted by ad, "Learn more" and "Shop now" dominate because a handful of consumer catalogs run thousands of them. Counted by company, using each advertiser's most common button:

Each advertiser's most common button

Company-weighted: share of companies: 1,444 advertisers with at least one button

learn58.9%
signup or start10.8%
other8.2%
shop8%
contact or quote5.5%
install4.9%
demo3.7%

58.9% of advertisers default to "Learn more." 10.8% lead with a sign-up or get-started button, 8% with a shop or order button, 5.5% with a quote, contact or message button, 4.9% with an app install, and 3.7% with a demo button.

Most common button, B2B vs B2C advertisers

Company-weighted: share of companies

learn70.9%
23.6%
signup or start12.3%
7%
demo5%
0.3%
contact or quote1.9%
13.6%
install3.3%
10%
shop0.5%
33.6%
B2B advertisersB2C advertisers

B2B and B2C advertisers barely overlap. 70.9% of B2B advertisers lead with "Learn more" and 5% with a demo button. Part of that is LinkedIn's default (its picker starts on "Learn more", and lead-gen form ads often pair it with a demo request), so the button understates demo intent; the landing-page section below has the other half. B2C advertisers lead with "Shop now" (33.6%) and app installs (10%).

What the copy offers, and what proof it carries

Ad-weighted: share of ads with readable copy (134,020, template catalog ads excluded)

free trial or free12.1%
discount or price8.3%
report or guide4.7%
webinar or event3.7%
demo2.6%
waitlist or early0.3%
proof: rating or review4%
proof: backed by or funding3.2%
proof: trusted by or named customer2.1%
proof: customer count or users0.6%
proof: award or press0.6%
proof: g2 gartner forrester0.2%

What the copy offers: 12.1% of ads say "free" or "free trial", 8.3% name a price or a discount, 4.7% push a report or guide, 3.7% an event or webinar, 2.6% a demo. Waitlists and early access are 0.3%. Proof in the text itself is rare: 4% of ads mention a rating or reviews, 3.2% funding or a backer, 2.1% a named customer, 0.2% an analyst or G2 badge. Most of the proof lives in the image or the landing page.

One artifact if you browse the Meta library yourself: 7,833 ads in our pull open with a token like {{product.name}}. Those aren't broken ads. They're dynamic catalog ads shown to a logged-out viewer with no product feed to fill the template. Real customers saw a product name; we left them out of the copy figures.

1,000 Series A ad headlines

The headline is the most portable part of any ad. Here are 1,000 of them, verbatim (the headline, or the opening line where a platform has none), from the Google, Meta and LinkedIn ads of 856 Series A companies. Filter by platform or sector inside.

Shop House of Chikankari Kurta - COD + Free Express Shipping

House of ChikankariGoogle

AKT | The Deodorant Balm SC.01

AKT LondonGoogle

Perfect tool for Telepathology - Affordable Whole Slide Imaging

Morphle LabsGoogle

Skywithclass - Fly First Class Affordably - Up to -70% Off

SKYWITHCLASSGoogle

Bags Storage Milan from €0.90 - Storage in Milan Centrale

Radical StorageGoogle

Boston Wedding Florists - (Custom Florals On A Budget)

Poppy FlowersGoogle

Scan. Plan. Build. - 3D scan rooms with our app

CanvasGoogle

Track Crypto Gains & Losses - Best Crypto Tax Calculator

CryptioGoogle

Contact us | Nonprofit Borrowing - We Finance Nonprofit Projects

Clearinghouse Community Development Financial InstitutionGoogle

Bima, Online insurance in Oman

BimaGoogle

5 Minutes Laser Circumcision - Best Treatment Cost Guaranteed

HexaHealthGoogle

Fastest Mortgage Approval - Fastest Mortgage in the UAE

HoloGoogle

oO Nutrabay COD Available | Free Shipping - Top Deals On Nutrabay

NutrabayGoogle

UV Water Purifier - UV os Light Years Ahead - Le... a

AquiSense TechnologiesGoogle

Your All-in-One Home = Gym

OxeFitGoogle

Up to 70% Off sale Live now - Splash Deals Live Now

Cava AthleisureGoogle

Alice Functional Mushrooms - Mushrooms are for Lovers

Alice MushroomsGoogle

Even Health Cover - Don’t overpay for healthcare

EvenGoogle

Get Your State Licenses Today - Get Your State License Quickly

LighthouseAIGoogle

Rafting Adventure a | Verona - Rafting a Verona cri i)

FreedomeGoogle

Bambo Nature Diapers - Bambo Nature For Babies

All Things BabyGoogle

Peter Blake art - Free Shipping Worldwide - Established in 1978

ArtsyGoogle

Accepting New Patients - Rheumatologist Near Me

Remission MedicalGoogle

HEST - Sleep Well. Play More

Hest OutdoorsGoogle

Where the click goes: a product page, then the homepage, almost never a campaign page

Where does the ad point? Google's library shows only the display domain for most search ads (a path is visible on 32.6% of Google destinations), so a Google "homepage" is usually just a hidden path. This section uses Meta and LinkedIn, where the full URL is exposed: 44,772 ads (39,914 Meta, 4,858 LinkedIn, since LinkedIn shows a link on only 26.6% of its ads), from 1,211 of the 1,900 Meta and LinkedIn advertisers. Destinations are classified from the URL path, so a campaign page without a telltale path counts as a product page.

Where the click goes (Meta and LinkedIn ads)

Ad-weighted: share of ads: 44,772 Meta and LinkedIn ads with a visible destination. Google's library shows only the domain, so Google is excluded here.

product or feature page46.2%
homepage19.2%
article or advertorial14.6%
app store12.8%
content or blog2.3%
demo or contact2%
campaign landing page1.2%
signup or trial0.9%
booking tool0.4%
pricing0.4%
app deeplink0.1%

Counted by ad, 46.2% point at a specific product or feature page, 19.2% at the homepage, 14.6% at an article-style page and 12.8% at an app store. Purpose-built campaign pages (a /lp/ or /go/ path) are 1.2% of destinations, demo and contact pages 2%, pricing pages 0.4%.

Each advertiser's most common destination

Company-weighted: share of companies: 1,211 Meta and LinkedIn advertisers

product or feature page57.1%
homepage17.6%
article or advertorial8%
content or blog6.1%
app store3.6%
demo or contact3.5%
campaign landing page1.9%
signup or trial1.6%
booking tool0.5%
pricing0.1%
app deeplink0.1%

Counted by company, 57.1% of those advertisers point most of their ads at a product page and 17.6% at the homepage; 35.7% point at least one ad there. The median advertiser uses 2 distinct destinations across all its ads, and 1.9% have a page on a /lp/ or /go/ path as their main destination. For brand-term search the homepage is often right; for cold social and LinkedIn ads, which is what these are, it rarely is. Nothing here measures results, so read it as what the median company does, not as what works.

Most common destination, B2B vs B2C advertisers

Company-weighted: share of companies

product or feature page57.8%
55.7%
homepage17.6%
15.5%
article or advertorial7.3%
11.3%
content or blog8.2%
1.4%
demo or contact4.5%
0.7%
app store0.4%
11.7%
campaign landing page1.9%
1.7%
signup or trial1.8%
1%
B2B advertisersB2C advertisers

B2B and B2C advertisers land in the same two places (product page, then homepage). The tails differ: B2B uses content pages (8.2% of advertisers) and demo or contact pages (4.5%); B2C uses app stores (11.7%). Put the demo page next to the demo button from the copy section and the "B2B ads are all book-a-demo" picture doesn't hold at Series A: most of them ask you to learn more, then show you the product.

Tracking, where we can see it: LinkedIn exposes an outbound URL on 26.6% of its ads (the rest use on-platform lead forms or have no link), and 44.7% of those carry a UTM or click ID. Meta exposes the URL on 97.8% of ads and 9.8% carry a tag; the Meta library sometimes strips query strings, so treat that as a floor rather than a verdict. Google shows a path on a third of its destinations, so its 6.2% says nothing.

1,100 real Series A ads for your inspiration

Enough numbers. Here are 1,100 actual creatives, pulled straight from the Meta, Google and LinkedIn ad libraries, run by 911 different companies that raised a Series A in the last two years. Hit play on any video ad to watch it right here. Filter by platform, sector, or B2B/B2C inside.

Ad by RAS Luxury Oils
RAS Luxury OilsFB/IG
Ad by Freedome
FreedomeGoogle
Ad by BeyondTrucks
BeyondTrucksLinkedIn
Ad by ResBiotic
ResBioticFB/IG
Ad by Oxylabs
OxylabsGoogle
Ad by Recur Club
Recur ClubLinkedIn
Ad by Coral Care
Coral CareFB/IG
Ad by Kampaay
KampaayGoogle
Ad by TeamLinkt
TeamLinktLinkedIn
Ad by Jumppoint
JumppointFB/IG
Ad by DÔEN
DÔENGoogle
Ad by Kertos
KertosLinkedIn
Ad by Ketone-IQ
Ketone-IQFB/IG
Ad by Radical Storage
Radical StorageGoogle
Ad by BotCity
BotCityLinkedIn
Ad by Klubi
KlubiFB/IG
Ad by House of Chikankari
House of ChikankariGoogle
Ad by TENEX.AI
TENEX.AILinkedIn
Ad by ariika
ariikaFB/IG
Ad by Omni
OmniGoogle
Ad by SheMed
SheMedLinkedIn
Ad by Next Fit
Next FitFB/IG
Ad by Remix Global AD
Remix Global ADGoogle
Ad by Bluefish
BluefishLinkedIn
Ad by Arogga
AroggaFB/IG
Ad by Scopevisio AG
Scopevisio AGGoogle
Ad by Drivepoint
DrivepointLinkedIn
Ad by Podeo
PodeoFB/IG
Ad by Morphle Labs
Morphle LabsGoogle
Ad by Daymark Health
Daymark HealthLinkedIn

Creatives are shown as served in the public Meta, Google and LinkedIn ad libraries, credited to the advertiser. A representative sample, not the full set.

Questions people ask about this study

What share of Series A companies run paid ads?

51.4% of the 4,930 companies we checked (raised a Series A between September 2024 and August 2026, live website, outside mainland China) had at least one ad in the Google, Meta or LinkedIn ad libraries as captured in September 2026 (Meta: active ads; Google and LinkedIn: shown within the past year). On the same companies, stricter definitions give 46.6% to 51.5%; rounds of $5M and up alone come to 57.6%. The article shows the full sensitivity table.

Which ad platform do Series A companies use most?

Google, at 38.1% of companies (an ad shown in the last twelve months). LinkedIn is second at 32.2% and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) third at 10.6%. For B2B companies LinkedIn and Google are close to level. The order is the same one we found across the Y Combinator portfolio.

Do Series A companies advertise more than YC companies?

On the same rule (any presence in a library), 51.5% of Series A companies against 44.5% of YC companies. Most of that gap is composition: a Series A company is larger and more B2B than the median YC company, and headcount predicts advertising in both studies.

Does raising a Series A switch advertising on?

We can't see it. Companies that raised in the last three months have ads at about the same rate as companies two years out, and once round size is held constant the curve rises only a few points over the first eighteen months. This is a snapshot of live ads, not the same companies followed over time, so it can't show a before-and-after.

Does round size predict whether a company advertises?

Not in a straight line. Adoption rises from 15.1% below $1M to 61.8% at $10-20M, then falls to 37.9% above $75M, where the rounds are mostly AI labs, hardware and defense companies.

Where does the data come from and can I download it?

The company list is every Series A round recorded in Crunchbase for the window, enriched from each company's Crunchbase profile. The ads come from the public Google Ads Transparency Center, Meta Ad Library and LinkedIn Ad Library, pulled with Apify scrapers. Every number traces to the CSV and JSON files linked in the method section.

Method and data

We started from every funding round Crunchbase records as a Series A announced between September 1, 2024 and August 31, 2026: 7,819 Crunchbase company records after collapsing extensions. Each was enriched from its Crunchbase profile (website, headquarters, headcount band, categories, lead investors) and its website was fetched to confirm it is live. Sector and B2B/B2C were assigned by a language model from the description and categories; on two 100-company hand checks the sector label agreed 94 times out of 100 and the B2B/B2C label 99 times.

Where the 7,819 went. 119 rows are Sri Lankan "Series A" rounds of $120,000 to $190,000 that look like spam submissions, and 27 are second records for a company already in the list (same name and date, or same website); both dropped. 1,086 have no live website (830 of them Chinese), 15 are recorded as closed, and 1,131 are headquartered in mainland China and reported separately because their ads run on platforms with no public library (1,042 of them were checked). That leaves 5,441 eligible companies, of which 4,930 were checked on all three libraries and are the headline pool. The remaining 511 were never checked: their websites only resolved after the library pass, and our scraping budget ran out before a second pass. They are spread across the whole window (15.1% are August 2026 rounds, although 61.1% of that month's rounds went unchecked), and if anything they skew toward advertising: 54.2% are American against 47% of the pool, with a median round of $16M against $12M. Counting all of them as non-advertisers would put the headline at 46.6%, a hard floor.

How a company counts as having ads. Meta: we found a Facebook page that is provably theirs (their site links to it, or its ads land on their domain) and the page has active ads; a name-matched page with no such ads never counts (we matched 2,480 Facebook pages in the pool and credited 521 as advertisers). LinkedIn: we searched the Ad Library by company name and kept an advertiser only when one of its ads lands on the company's own domain, or its account name matches exactly and its visible clicks don't point at another company; the library keeps roughly a year of ads. Google: the company's own domain appears in the Transparency Center's advertiser index (a domain identifies one advertiser, so the match is exact; companies whose "website" is a shared host such as a link-in-bio page are excluded) and at least one of its ads was shown in the twelve months before capture, since the Transparency Center is an archive that keeps stopped ads. Among Google advertisers whose ads we pulled, 99% met that bar and 75.3% had an ad shown in the last 30 days. 482 Google advertisers' ads were never pulled (budget), and they are counted at the pulled rate; the confirmed-only figures are in the sensitivity table. A company whose website now redirects to an unrelated domain (an acquirer) is never credited with that domain's ads.

What these numbers are not. They are presence in a library on one date, so every figure is a floor on "has ever advertised". LinkedIn returns up to 20 ads per advertiser (575 advertisers hit it), our Meta pull stopped at 300 per page, 78 Google pulls were truncated by run limits, and the Google pull covers 74.3% of Google advertisers, so ad-level figures lean toward large accounts; company-weighted figures are given alongside. Google ad text is extracted from rendered ads and a small share of non-English copy is garbled. Pixel detection reads raw HTML and misses tags loaded by a tag manager. Crunchbase's round labels are the industry's standard record but not clean: a hand check of 20 rounds confirmed 15 by press coverage, found 2 ambiguous and could not confirm 3, and the top of the list carries billion-dollar rounds that are "Series A" in name only. None of this measures spend or results.

How we pulled the ads. Crunchbase rounds and profiles came through the Crunchbase scraper and Crunchbase Company API actors on Apify. The ads came from the Meta Ad Library page resolver and Meta Ad Library ads scraper, the Google Ads scraper, and the LinkedIn Ad Library scraper. Capture date: 2026-09-17.

The data is open. companies.csv has one row per company (round, HQ, sector, size, whether it was checked, whether it is in the pool, who advertises where, library links). stats.json holds every figure in this article, including the ad-level ones. aggregates.csv is the adoption breakdowns in long format, and ads_sample.csv is a platform-stratified sample of the ads for reading, not for computing shares. The YC study this one is modelled on is here. We sell paid-ads services; the data is there so you don't have to take our word for any of it.

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