Strategy 17 min read

What ads are YC companies running in 2026? Our complete, systematic study

We checked every Y Combinator company against the Google, Meta and LinkedIn ad libraries. Just under half the portfolio advertises at all, they reach for Google first, LinkedIn second and Meta a distant third, and the companies that win treat it as a permanent line item for years.

Robin Choy

Founder · July 22, 2026

44% run ads Google 33.7% Top 100: 72% Meta 8.1% LinkedIn 23.6% 133,221 ads 6,055 companies

We took all 6,055 companies in the Y Combinator directory and looked each one up in the public ad libraries that Google, Meta and LinkedIn are legally required to keep. Then we pulled the ads themselves, 133,221 of them, to see what YC companies actually run.

The short version

44% of live YC companies run paid ads across Google, Meta and LinkedIn (34.9% if you only count Google and Meta). Across the full directory, dead and dormant included, it is 36.1%.
The winners never turn it off: 72% of the top 100 YC companies by funding advertise, some running the same ad for four years or more.
Google is the default, LinkedIn a strong second, Meta a distant third. 33.7% run Google, 23.6% run LinkedIn, 8.1% run Meta.
One in ten YC companies advertise only on LinkedIn, running nothing on Google or Meta.
Headcount predicts advertising better than anything: 26.5% at 1-5 people, 90.5% at 500+.
Industrials barely advertise (25.1%); Education leads (56.6%).

Just under half advertise, and they start with Google

Of the 4,767 YC companies with a live website that are still operating, acquired, or public, 44.5% run paid ads on at least one of Google, Meta, or LinkedIn. On Google or Meta alone it is 34.9%. Across all 6,055 companies in the directory, including the dead and the dormant, it is 36.1%. The rest we found running none.

The ad libraries only show what is live right now, so a company that advertised last year and paused reads here as a non-advertiser. Read these as "advertising today," not "has ever advertised."

When YC companies do advertise, they start with Google, and LinkedIn is a clear second:

33.7% run Google ads
23.6% run LinkedIn ads
8.3% run Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram)

Google first, LinkedIn second, Meta a distant third

Google33.7%

LinkedIn23.6%

Meta8.1%

Look at how many companies lean on a single channel and the same order holds. Google is the one most can stand on alone, a fair number run only LinkedIn, and Meta almost never stands by itself:

Used as the only paid channel

Google only16.2%

LinkedIn only9.6%

Meta only1.0%

16.2% of companies run only Google, 9.6% only LinkedIn, and 1.0% only Meta. That LinkedIn-only group is 458 companies, and it says something plain: for a real slice of the portfolio, LinkedIn is the whole paid strategy, the same way Google is for others.

Meta is the one that almost never stands alone. It is something a company adds on top of Google, not instead of it. One reading is that Google captures demand that already exists, someone searching for what you sell, while Meta has to create it, and companies selling software to other businesses reach for the former first. We can only see who runs what today, not the order they got there, so treat that as interpretation.

LinkedIn is their second channel, and it is almost all B2B

23.6% of live YC companies run LinkedIn ads, 1,127 companies in all: three times as many as run on Meta, and second only to Google. It reaches a distinct crowd, too. 458 of them, one in ten of the whole portfolio, advertise on LinkedIn and nowhere else: no Google ads, no Meta ads. For those companies LinkedIn is the entire paid strategy.

Which companies? Almost exactly the ones you would guess. LinkedIn adoption tracks how B2B a sector is:

LinkedIn is a B2B channel

B2B27.6%

Fintech25.1%

Real Estate24.2%

Healthcare18.1%

Industrials18.1%

Education16.2%

Consumer13.9%

B2B software leads at 27.6%, and consumer sits at the bottom at 13.9%, half the B2B rate. This is the mirror image of Meta, where consumer brands lead. Nobody sells a payroll platform to accountants on Instagram, and nobody sells a meal kit to families on LinkedIn. The channel follows the buyer.

What runs there looks like B2B too. Two thirds of the ads are a single static image, a fifth are video, and the rest are formats you really only see on LinkedIn: the swipeable PDF "document" ad, and the "conversation" ad that lands in your inbox as a message.

What a LinkedIn ad looks like

Single image68.1%

Video19.5%

Document (PDF)5.2%

Message3.3%

Carousel2.3%

The copy gives the game away. The most common call to action is "Learn more," but the one that never shows up on Meta or Google is right behind it: "Request Demo." These ads sell reports, benchmarks, webinars and demos, not something you buy on the spot. Almost a quarter ask a question in the headline, and 27.6% mention AI, a higher rate than in Meta or Google ads, because LinkedIn is where AI companies sell to other businesses. A sample, verbatim:

"Tired of AI Hype? See the Actual Numbers"

Algolia

"You can't hit a target you haven't defined."

HackerRank

"Eliminate data bottlenecks"

Amplitude

"Read the Webflow AEO Maturity Index"

Webflow

"Let your teams build freely, while you govern it all"

Retool

"See GitLab Duo Agent Platform in Action"

GitLab

"Enterprise rollouts backed by expert teams"

Deel

"200,000+ Apps. 500+ Marketers. One Report on What Comes Next"

OneSignal

Real LinkedIn headlines, verbatim, from YC companies. Reports, demos and benchmarks, not "Buy now."

The best predictor of advertising is headcount

Nothing in the data predicts advertising as cleanly as company size.

Ad adoption climbs cleanly with headcount

1 to 526.5%

6 to 1043.7%

11 to 2551.5%

26 to 5063.7%

51 to 10073.4%

101 to 50087.7%

500+90.5%

A three-person company almost never buys ads. A hundred-person company almost always does. Paid acquisition is not what YC companies do early to find product-market fit; it is what they turn on once they have a product and revenue to protect. Growth-stage companies advertise at 71.4%, against 37.7% for early-stage.

If you run a small YC company and you are not advertising, you are with the large majority. And that is the opportunity. Paid acquisition is wide open at your size: it is not where your similarly-sized competitors are fighting yet, so the space to win cheap attention is still there for the taking.

By sector, Education leads and Industrials lag

Ad adoption by industry

Education56.6%

Real Estate55.8%

Consumer52.8%

Fintech48.3%

B2B45.8%

Healthcare35.7%

Industrials25.1%

Sell hardware and you mostly are not buying ads: hard-tech sits at 19%, with hardware and robotics under 30%. The platform split by sector is stark too. Meta is a consumer channel here, Consumer companies run Meta at 17.9% and Education at 25.3%, against B2B's 5.6%. B2B lives on Google.

Adoption by batch is roughly flat from 2011 to 2021, then declines for the newest batches: 64% for 2016, 54% for 2021, 37% for 2024, 19% for 2026. Part of that is simply age, since a 2026 company may not have started advertising yet, and part is that recent batches skew toward very small, very early AI companies. We can't cleanly separate the two effects with a single snapshot.

Newer batches advertise far less

What the top 100 YC companies do

We took the 100 highest-funded YC companies (the ycdb.co ranking: Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Instacart, Coinbase, Reddit, Gusto and so on) and ran them through the same three libraries as everyone else. They behave nothing like the rest of the portfolio.

72% of the top 100 are advertising right now, against 44% across all of YC. They are ahead on every channel, and the gap only widens the more channels you count:

The top 100 advertise more, on every channel

Any platform72%

Google65%

LinkedIn47%

Meta26%

So the top 100 roughly double the portfolio on every channel. But the real separation is in running more than one. 45% of the top 100 advertise on two or more platforms, and 21% run all three, against 18% and 3% for everyone else. Paid acquisition at this level is not one experiment on one channel; it is a standing, multi-channel operation with a budget and an owner.

They also run far more ads. The median top-100 advertiser has 106 live ads sitting in the libraries. The median YC advertiser has 9. That is more than ten times the volume, and at the top end it becomes a different sport altogether: DoorDash and Fivestars run into the thousands, Instacart past 1,800, Matterport 1,600, Gusto and Webflow around 1,000, Stripe 900, Eight Sleep 600. The libraries cap how many ads we can pull per company, so even those are floors.

A sample of what the top 100 actually run:

A selection of live ads from the highest-funded YC companies, as served in the public libraries. Hit play on the video ones to watch the original.

The single most telling number, though, is how long the ads stay live. DoorDash, Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, GitLab and Matterport all have ads that have run continuously for more than four and a half years, as far back as the libraries keep records. Nobody keeps paying to serve the same ad for nearly five years unless it is quietly making money. A long-running ad is the closest thing this data gives you to a profit signal, and the biggest names are full of them.

So what do they do differently, beyond spending more? Three things, and none of them exotic. They are on more channels at once. They leave winning ads running for years instead of churning through creative. And they are a little more likely to send the click to a purpose-built page than to the homepage: 65% of their ads deep-link past the front door, against 59% for the rest of YC. It is the same playbook everyone else can already run, just run with more consistency and left on far longer.

Put together, it reads as a revealed preference. The companies with the most funding, the best analytics teams and the most scrutiny on every dollar treat paid ads as a permanent, growing, multi-channel line item, on all three platforms, for years at a time. That is about as clear a signal as this data gives that paid acquisition is a profitable, durable growth channel. The winners are not asking whether ads work. They are compounding on the fact that they do, and the question for everyone earlier on the curve is not whether to be in the channel, but how much sooner to start.

What the ads look like

We pulled every live ad from all 390 Facebook/Instagram advertisers, and a 55% sample of Google advertisers, 121,841 ads in total. The creative findings below are census-complete for Facebook and Instagram; the Google creative mix is from that sample.

Facebook is video. Google is text.

On Facebook and Instagram, the largest format is video at 35%, then dynamic catalog ads at 33% and static images at 25%. On Google, 62% are text search ads, which is close to true by definition, plus 24% display images and 14% video.

The copy is short and literal

The median YC ad headline is 5 words; body copy runs 15. The most common opening words are the plain ones: "get", "start", "try", "free".

Buttons are narrow too. "Learn more" is 33% of all call-to-action buttons, ahead of "Install now" (16%), "Shop now" (11%) and "Sign up" (11%). On Meta the button is a preset dropdown rather than free text, and "Learn more" is often the deliberate top-of-funnel choice, so read this as convention, not as evidence anyone is or isn't testing.

"Done with circleci bugs?"

Bitrise

"Get 6 Months Free Payroll"

Gusto

"Try a class for just $5"

ClassDojo

"Get Your App Live in 24 Hours"

Per Diem

"Get Leads on Autopilot: 4x Higher Response Rates"

Artisan

"Sales Plans Misaligned? Align Sales in One Tool"

CaptivateIQ

"Start Building For Free: Global Coverage, Simple API"

Didit

"Convert 1.4M IRA to Roth at Age 65?"

SmartAsset

Real headlines, verbatim. Notice how many open with a plain command verb or a question, and how many just state the offer.

One curiosity for the data nerds. The most common opening string across all 121,841 ads is not a word, it is {{product.name}}, in 10,185 ads. This is not thousands of broken live ads. It is how the Meta Ad Library displays dynamic catalog ads to a logged-out viewer: the advertiser's product feed fills that token in at delivery, but the public library has no feed to draw from, so it shows the raw template. Ninety-one percent of these are dynamic-format ads, which is the tell. Real customers saw a product name. It is an artifact of how the library stores catalog ads, not a mistake anyone is making.

1,000 YC ad headlines

The headlines are the most portable part of any ad. Here are 1,000 of them, verbatim, from the Google, Meta and LinkedIn ads of 339 YC companies. Steal shamelessly. Filter by platform or industry inside.

Watch the Free On-Demand Webinar

AlgoliaFB/IG

Learn how to implement PLG from experts

AmplitudeFB/IG

Hit the link and we'll see you there!

ClipboardFB/IG

Unlimited payroll runs.

GustoFB/IG

Your Chronic Illness Companion

JunoFB/IG

Find them in minutes on Prolific

ProlificFB/IG

Some Questions are Best Left to the Pros

SmartAssetFB/IG

Proactive Maintenance With Time Save

TractianFB/IG

Keep Serving Patients, Through Any Crisis

WeaveFB/IG

Your brand. Your web. Your story.

WebflowFB/IG

Your Business Calls. Automated.

Bland AIFB/IG

Source vintage & secondhand to resell

FleekFB/IG

Apply to StayQrious Neoschool Now

StayQriousFB/IG

Flexible plans. All the features.

ZeplinFB/IG

Share more with Dropbox

DropboxFB/IG

One dashboard, simpler tracking

RazorpayFB/IG

Find Out If Rippling Is Right for You

RipplingFB/IG

Baixe o ARQ aqui

ARQFB/IG

Start automating your work today

ZapierFB/IG

Skip the Hard Work. Download User Journey Map

OneSignalFB/IG

Get started today for free.

BrexFB/IG

Get the Airbnb app

AirbnbFB/IG

Free Demat, 100% Online, 0 AMC

GrowwFB/IG

Are you a store owner?

MeeshoFB/IG

50% off Your First Month

ScentbirdFB/IG

Get started today

StripeFB/IG

Check every claim against its source

AnaraFB/IG

Production-Grade FFF Printers for End-Use Parts

AON3DFB/IG

Try Agent Mail for Free

AgentMailFB/IG

Optimise your recovery with Sauna and Cold Plunge

BlokFB/IG

Duplicate any website with AI

Anima AppFB/IG

Finally, a real alternative to NBS Chorus

AvoiceFB/IG

Talk to any app with Aqua. Now on iOS.

Aqua VoiceFB/IG

Where the click goes

Of the 75,445 ads where we could see the destination, 41.9% point at the company homepage and 34.7% at a specific product page. Only 3.6% go to a purpose-built campaign landing page.

For cold prospecting traffic, especially on paid social, a homepage is a weak destination: the visitor arrives with the specific question the ad just raised and lands on the page built to answer everyone's. For a single-product company running brand-term search, the homepage often is the right page, so this is not a universal mistake. But the share pointing at a generic homepage rather than a page matched to the ad is high enough to be worth a look if it describes your account.

Purpose-built campaign pages (the ones doing it right)

gusto.com/go/payroll-041 algolia.com/lp/webinar-algolia-search-and-retrieval-2026 webflow.com/lp/webflow-enterprise joinarc.com/lp/borrowers rippling.com/lp/ai-general

Article and advertorial pages (heavy in fintech)

smartasset.com/advertorial/family-trust-abrv smartasset.com/retirement/find-a-financial-planner amplitude.com/blog/aha-moment-safety-culture getweave.com/navigating-the-economic-state-of-healthcare/

Straight to a demo or trial

amplitude.com/request-a-demo algolia.com/demorequest tractian.com/en/cmms/book-a-tour bird.com/demo

The tracking behind the ads

Every ad platform tags its own outbound clicks. Meta appends parameters to the destination, Google auto-tags every paid click with a gclid, LinkedIn stamps its own. So in practice essentially every advertiser here is tracking something: the question was never whether they tag, it is how. The public libraries strip most query strings from the URLs they show, so we only see the full tag on a fraction of ads, but on those, the conventions are worth a look.

The plumbing is standard: utm_source is usually google, facebook or meta; utm_medium is cpc, paid_social or paid. The interesting part is utm_campaign, where two completely different schools show up.

The first is the enterprise taxonomy: rigid, delimited, machine-parseable, encoding channel, region, segment and creative in one string.

utm_campaign=fb_amer_b2x_ecomm_ecomm_airwbhih_lgf_video_ecomm utm_campaign=eg_global_brand_x_x_en_flow_mode_15

The second is the human-readable, fiscal-year style, common among the growth-stage SaaS companies:

utm_campaign=fy27-Q2-brand-awareness utm_campaign=fy27-aeo-launch-webinar utm_campaign=fy27-security-governance-webinar

And then, inevitably, the same dynamic-template leak we saw in the ad copy shows up in the tracking. A slice of ads ship UTMs with the tokens never filled in, so the analytics receive the literal placeholder instead of the value:

utm_source={{site_source_name}} & utm_medium=pago_{{placement}}

If you need a tracking template, steal one of these. Each uses the platform's own dynamic fields, so you set it once and it fills itself in for every campaign, ad set and ad. Meta takes double braces, Google takes single, and both drop straight into the tracking-template box in the ad tool:

Meta (Ads Manager, URL parameters field): utm_source={{site_source_name}}&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}&utm_term={{adset.name}}

Google Ads (final URL suffix): utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={campaignid}&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={creative}

LinkedIn (append to the destination URL): utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=fy27-q2-brand&utm_content=ad-name

Meta's {{site_source_name}} resolves to fb, ig or an, so Facebook and Instagram land as separate rows without splitting your campaigns. LinkedIn has no equivalent auto-fill for older formats, so its campaign and ad names are typed by hand, which is exactly why the fiscal-year naming scheme took hold there.

If nothing else in this piece is actionable, this is: pick one consistent campaign-naming convention, use a template like the ones above, and check that it actually renders before the ad goes live.

Two smaller things

Ad records outlive companies. For 8.6% of the inactive-but-still-online companies (61 of 706), a live ad record still sits in the transparency indexes. We can't see whether money is still being spent, only that the record is there.

The ones that made it keep spending. Of the 21 YC companies that went public, 14 still run ads, 10 of them on Meta.

1,154 real YC ads for your inspiration

Enough numbers. Here are 1,154 actual creatives, pulled straight from the Meta, Google and LinkedIn ad libraries, run by 814 different YC companies. Product shots, founder photos, text-on-color, search units, LinkedIn demo ads, the lot. Hit play on any video ad to watch it. Filter by platform or industry inside, or browse the full, filterable set in the free ad examples tool.

Ad by Leon & George — Leon & GeorgeFB/IG

Ad by Dealls – Jobs & Mentoring — Dealls – Jobs & MentoringFB/IG

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.

Method and data

We joined the Y Combinator company directory (6,055 companies) against three public, legally mandated ad databases: the Google Ads Transparency Center, the Meta Ad Library, which covers Facebook and Instagram, and the LinkedIn Ad Library.

How a company counts as advertising. For Google, the company's own web domain appears in the Transparency Center's index; domains are unique, so this match is exact. For Meta, we found a Facebook page that is provably theirs (either their website links to it, or its ads point back at their domain) and confirmed the page is running live ads. For LinkedIn, we searched the Ad Library by company name and kept an advertiser only when its account name matched exactly or one of its ads landed on the company's own domain. That distinction matters: a plain name search on LinkedIn confuses the YC company "Parakey" with an unrelated Swedish firm of the same name, so we never counted a company on a name resemblance alone.

What these numbers are not. All three libraries show only currently-live ads, so every figure is "advertising now," not "ever advertised," and all of them are a floor. The Google creative-mix figures come from a 55% sample of Google advertisers; the Meta figures are a full census of all 390. On LinkedIn we captured up to 20 live ads per advertiser, so the LinkedIn adoption rate and copy are solid but per-company ad counts are capped. And this measures who advertises and what they run, never how much they spend, which no public source discloses.

How we pulled the ads. The ad data comes from Apify scrapers run against the public ad libraries: the Meta Ad Library page resolver and Meta Ad Library ads scraper for Facebook and Instagram, the Google Ads scraper for the Transparency Center, and the LinkedIn Ad Library scraper for LinkedIn.

The data is open. Every number here traces to two files: companies.csv, a per-company table of who advertises on which platform, and aggregates.csv, every summary statistic in this article.

Built by Adside. We help companies run better paid ads. If you recognized your own account in the homepage-destination number, we can help with that.