Free Competitor Research: What a Chrome Extension Shows in 10 Seconds

Every guide to free competitor research ends the same way: a list of thirty tools, each with a signup form, and no answer to the question you actually opened the tab with. Which of these stores is worth studying?

The Brandsearch Chrome extension answers it on the page you are already on. You click the icon in the toolbar, a panel opens down the right of the store, and it prints what that store runs, what it is worth and what it spends. This article is nine stores put through that one click, with the panel photographed on each of them.

Together the nine carry €26M of disclosed EU and UK spend across 20,548 active Meta ads. The interesting part is that those two numbers barely relate to each other. The store with the most ads in the list is sixth on money. The two stores with the most money run 159 ads and 31 ads.

The nine stores

Ordered by the EU and UK spend the panel prints, highest first.

How to read the numbers

Spend is EU and UK only. Meta is forced to publish per-advertiser spend in Europe and the UK and almost nowhere else, so the euro column is the disclosed slice of a budget, never the budget. This is why portlandleathergoods.com sits last on €12.8K while doing 5.2M visits a month: 95% of its traffic is American, so almost none of its spend has to be published. Read the euro column as "how much of this brand's money is visible", not "how much this brand spends".

Ad count is not spend. dusk.com runs 159 active ads against €6M, and loopearplugs.com runs 7,882 against €1.9M. Ranked by ad count the order is almost the reverse of the order by money. Every guide that tells you to judge a competitor by counting their active ads is teaching you to read the wrong column.

The rank badges are worldwide. Where a later section shows a landing page at #1 or an ad in the top 1%, that rank is computed across everything the brand runs in every market. A page can rank first globally and still sit next to a modest euro figure, because the rest of the budget was never disclosed. A small number in euros is not a weak result.

These are the panel's own figures, read on 12 September 2026. Nothing here is recomputed or rounded by hand. Where the panel printed €6M, the article says €6M. Traffic and revenue are estimates and the panel labels them as such; spend is filed disclosure and is not an estimate.

1. dusk.com: €6M on 159 ads

See this brand in Brandsearch

DUSK sells beds, sofas, bedding and home accessories, and it is the clearest case in the list of money hiding behind a small ad count. The panel prints 159 active Meta ads and €6M of EU and UK spend, an average of €611.4K over the last 30 days. Traffic is 5.17M a month and rising 32%, which is the strongest growth of the nine.

The reason its euro figure is so high is in the row underneath the traffic chart: 95% GB. A British store selling to Britain has to disclose nearly everything it spends, so for DUSK the visible number and the real number are close to the same thing. That is rare, and it makes DUSK the best benchmark in the list rather than the biggest spender in it.

Where those 159 ads point

Clicking "Analyze in-depth" from the panel opens the full brand view, and the Landing pages tab explains the small ad count. DUSK has 226 landing pages, and the ranked list puts the plain homepage at #1 with 584 ads and €3.6M behind it, then /collections/inspired-by-influencers/ at #2 with 78 ads and €135k, then /collections/the-best-of-dusk at #3 with 73 ads and €162k. Those counts are cumulative rather than live, which is why 584 sits above the 159 running today.

The shape is a brand that funnels almost everything into one destination and tests collections around the edges. Pull any competitor's landing pages, ranked by the ads pointing at them, and the first row usually tells you where the budget actually goes.

2. nothing.tech: €5.3M on 31 ads

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Nothing sells phones and earbuds, and it is the number that should end the ad-counting habit for good. The panel prints 31 active Meta ads and €5.3M of EU and UK spend. Thirty-one ads. A brand running two hundred would look, on every "count their ads" heuristic ever written, like the more serious advertiser.

The traffic row explains part of it: 24% India, 20% United States, 8% Great Britain. Nothing is a genuinely global consumer electronics brand whose European slice alone runs to millions, and it concentrates that money into a handful of creatives rather than spreading it across a testing grid. The panel prints no 30-day average for this brand, so none is quoted here.

3. gymshark.com: €3.4M on 3,022 ads

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Gymshark sells gym clothing, and it is the list's volume operator: 3,022 active Meta ads and €3.4M of EU and UK spend, averaging €570.9K over the last 30 days. Traffic is 15.84M a month, down 5%, against a revenue band of $45M to $81M.

Set that next to Nothing and the contrast is the whole article. Gymshark runs roughly a hundred times as many ads for two thirds of the disclosed money. Neither brand is doing it wrong. They are running different machines, and a panel that shows both numbers side by side tells you which machine you are looking at in about two seconds.

The hooks behind 3,022 ads

Volume like Gymshark's is only interesting if you can see what it is testing. The Hooks tab breaks the ad library into opening lines: 435 hooks, 54 still running. The one that has survived longest is "We're Jim Sharp." at 284 days across 3 of its 11 ads, followed by "We're Gymshark the gym wear brand who's in the name?" at 269 days and "When have we ever been just one thing?" at 250 days.

Three of the top hooks are founder and brand-identity lines rather than product claims, which is a strategy you cannot read off an ad count. Find the hooks already working in your niche and the durable ones separate from the noise quickly.

4. esn.com: €3M on 523 ads

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ESN sells whey protein, boosters, vitamins and fitness snacks, and it is the second store in the list whose disclosed figure is close to its real one. The panel prints 523 active Meta ads and €3M of EU and UK spend, averaging €139K over the last 30 days, against 4.47M monthly visits and an 18M€ to 32M€ revenue band.

The country row reads 57% Germany, 9% Austria, 7% France: this is a European brand selling to Europe, so the disclosure rules cover nearly all of it. Note that the panel prints its revenue in euros rather than dollars. It follows the store's own currency, which matters when you are comparing two rows and one of them is American.

5. ridge.com: €2.7M on 1,284 ads

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The Ridge sells wallets, keycases and travel essentials. The panel prints 1,284 active Meta ads and €2.7M of EU and UK spend, with traffic at 5.57M a month and up 59%, the sharpest rise of the nine. The 30-day average spend is €20.4K, low against the €2.7M total, because only 5% of its traffic is British and the store is 72% American.

That gap between a big cumulative figure and a small recent average is worth learning to read. It usually means a brand that ran hard in Europe at some point and is currently pointed elsewhere, which is a different competitor from dusk.com at €611.4K a month right now.

What the rank view adds

The extension is the trigger and the full brand view is the workbench. Ridge's Ad Rank tab summarises the account as statics running offers and sweepstake entries, bottom of funnel and already product aware, on that same product page, tagged Static 3/4, BOF 3/4, Product aware 4/4 and Product page 4/4. Underneath it plots every ad's rank against how long it ran, so the durable winners separate from the churn visually.

The rank badges on those ads are worldwide, not European. An ad marked top 1% is top 1% of everything Ridge runs anywhere, which is why the badge and the modest euro average can sit on the same brand without contradiction.

6. loopearplugs.com: €1.9M on 7,882 ads

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Loop sells earplugs for concerts, sleep and focus, and it runs 7,882 active Meta ads, by far the most in the list, against €1.9M of EU and UK spend. The 30-day average is €831K, the second highest here, so unlike Ridge this is a brand spending heavily right now.

Nearly eight thousand live ads on a 49-product catalogue is a deliberate strategy rather than a mess: a small range multiplied across every audience, format and market the brand sells into. It is also the clearest demonstration that a high ad count means high creative throughput, not a high budget. Check your own number against the brands in your category before deciding yours is too low.

7. comfrt.com: €1.9M on 5,090 ads

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Comfrt sells hoodies, blankets and loungewear, and it has the highest traffic in the list at 16.11M a month, up 12%, on a $42M to $76M revenue band. It runs 5,090 active Meta ads against €1.9M of EU and UK spend, averaging €170.4K over the last 30 days.

It is also the only store of the nine running Shopify's free Dawn theme. Eight of the others run something custom or bespoke, from Gymshark's GS2 to Loop's own Loop theme. The highest-traffic store in the list is on the default theme, which is a useful corrective if you are about to spend a quarter on a rebuild. It matches the wider read on which themes the highest-traffic stores actually run.

8. ohpolly.com: €1.8M on 1,446 ads

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Oh Polly sells womenswear staples and occasionwear designed in London. The panel prints 1,446 active Meta ads and €1.8M of EU and UK spend, averaging €70.7K over the last 30 days, on 4.17M monthly visits and an £11M to £21M revenue band.

Its traffic splits 49% United States, 17% Great Britain, 12% Australia, so this is a British brand whose largest market is America. The euro figure therefore understates it by more than DUSK's does and less than Portland Leather's, which is exactly the middle of the disclosure spectrum this list is built to show.

9. portlandleathergoods.com: €12.8K on 1,111 ads

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Portland Leather Goods sells handmade leather tote bags, purses and backpacks, and it is in this list to stop you misreading the last column. It runs 1,111 active Meta ads against €12.8K of EU and UK spend, a 30-day average the panel prints as €0.05.

A brand doing 5.2M visits and $17M to $31M a month is not advertising on twelve thousand euros. Its traffic is 95% American and 3% Canadian, so essentially none of its budget falls under European disclosure. This row is the reason the euro column has to be read as visibility rather than as size, and it is the single most common mistake made with this data.

What the extension adds to the Meta Ad Library

The panel is the half of the extension you open on purpose. The other half runs by itself: on facebook.com/ads/library the extension injects into Meta's own cards, without being asked, and adds three controls to each one.

The image above is one frame holding both states. The right-hand card is untouched and shows what Meta gives you: an active badge, a library ID, a start date, a platform list. No money. The left-hand card has had its Check EU & UK Adspend button clicked, and the button has been replaced in place by 745.9K reach, 6.71K€ total and 86.06€ a day across 1 ad. Underneath each advertiser the extension also adds "Add to Spectre" and "See Page's ad library", and puts a Shopify badge on advertisers that run Shopify.

That is the whole argument for installing it rather than bookmarking the Ad Library. The Ad Library tells you an ad exists. Install the Brandsearch Chrome extension and the same page tells you what it cost. For the fuller version of what the Ad Library leaves out and how to turn a spend figure into a decision, see what the Meta Ad Library hides about reach and spend.

What the nine have in common

The two biggest spenders run the fewest ads. dusk.com at 159 and nothing.tech at 31 take the top two places on disclosed money, while loopearplugs.com at 7,882 and comfrt.com at 5,090 sit sixth and seventh. Across the nine, ad count and disclosed spend run in almost opposite directions.

Home market decides how much you can see. The two stores whose traffic is mostly European, dusk.com at 95% GB and esn.com at 57% DE, have euro figures close to their true budgets. The two most American, portlandleathergoods.com at 95% and comfrt.com at 85%, have figures that are close to meaningless as a measure of size. Check the country row before you compare two brands on spend.

Growth is not the default. Four of the nine have traffic rising, led by ridge.com at 59% and dusk.com at 32%. Five are falling, esn.com hardest at 14%. This is a list of large healthy Shopify stores and most of them are down month on month, which is worth remembering before reading your own dip as a crisis.

Custom themes are the norm and it does not predict much. Eight of the nine run a bespoke or own-name theme. The ninth, comfrt.com, runs stock Dawn and has the highest traffic in the list. If you are choosing where to spend engineering time, this is evidence the theme is not it.

Method

Nine live Shopify stores, each opened in a real browser with the Brandsearch Chrome extension version 4.0.1 installed from the Chrome Web Store, with the panel opened through the extension's own toolbar action. Every figure in the table and in the nine sections was read off the panel in the screenshot beside it. Captured 12 September 2026.

Candidates came from the Brandsearch Brand Library filtered to Shopify stores above 300,000 monthly visits with at least 25 active Meta ads and a real catalogue, then cut to nine that between them cover British, German, American and global-first brands, so the disclosure effect is visible rather than averaged away. Ordering is by the EU and UK spend figure the panel prints, and where two stores tie at €1.9M the higher 30-day average goes first.

Three stores were dropped rather than written around. on.com, lounge.com and boden.com each rendered the panel correctly, but the capture connection dropped before the screenshot on all three attempts, so there is no image behind their numbers and they are not in the table.

One field was deliberately left out. The panel prints a product count, and on two of these stores it disagrees with the count the full app shows for the same brand: comfrt.com reads 10 in the panel and 263 in the app, ridge.com reads 772 and 300. Until those agree, no product count is quoted anywhere in this article.

Traffic and revenue are modelled estimates and the panel labels them so. Spend and reach are not estimates: they are the figures Meta is required to publish for advertisers in the EU and UK. Rank badges are worldwide.

API and MCP

The shortlist behind this article came out of the API, and the same query runs from a terminal or from any AI tool through MCP.

curl -s -H "X-API-Key: $BRANDSEARCH_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.brandsearch.co/v1/brands?platform=shopify&sort_by=min_revenue&sort_order=desc&page_size=100&product_count_min=5&monthly_visits_min=300000&meta_active_min=25&fields=id,name,niche,brand_type,country_code,monthly_visits,min_revenue,max_revenue,product_count,last_meta_active_count,description"

That returns the ranked store list with the same fields the panel reads from, so you can build the shortlist programmatically and then use the extension to inspect the stores that survive it. The MCP connector puts the same index inside Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT, which is the faster route if you would rather ask for "Shopify stores in home furnishing with high traffic and a low active ad count" than write the filter yourself.

Questions people ask

What does the extension actually show on a Shopify store?
One panel with the store's platform and launch month, its theme, its average price, its social accounts, a monthly traffic figure with a three-month trend and a top-three country split, an estimated revenue band with a per-day figure, the number of active Meta ads, and the EU and UK spend behind them. It has Overview, Products, Ads, Save, Funnels and Freebies tabs across the top.

Is it free?
It is listed on the Chrome Web Store and installing it costs nothing. Every panel photographed in this article was captured on a signed-in Brandsearch account, so what a signed-out panel shows is not something this article tested and not something it claims.

Why is the spend in euros when the store is American?
Because that column is not the brand's budget, it is the part of it that European and British law forces Meta to publish. An American store advertising mostly at home discloses very little, which is why portlandleathergoods.com shows €12.8K on 1,111 live ads.

Does it show TikTok ad spend?
No. Spend disclosure and the rank badges are Meta only. TikTok data in Brandsearch is organic engagement: followers, views, video counts and engagement rate. Any tool promising you a TikTok ad spend figure for a brand is estimating it.

Can I get the same data without installing anything?
Yes, through the API query above or by opening a brand directly in the app. The extension exists to save the search step, not to unlock something the app withholds.

Is this the same as a theme or app detector?
No. A detector answers what a store is built with. This answers whether it is working: traffic direction, revenue band, live ad count and disclosed spend, in the same panel. For a wider comparison of the category, see the best Shopify spy tools in 2026, and for the branded walkthrough see the Brandsearch Chrome extension on Shopify store data.