WhatRunsWhere alternative: what to use now the tool is offline

WhatRunsWhere is gone. Its domain was re-registered on 21 October 2026 and now serves a parking page, and the self-serve product no longer exists. Replacements split by job: Adbeat for publisher placements, AdPlexity for affiliate and mobile traffic, Anstrex for native and push, Sensor Tower for enterprise spend estimates, and adextract for agent-readable ad library data.

What happened to WhatRunsWhere?

The registry record settles it. Verisign's RDAP entry for whatrunswhere.com shows a fresh registration created on 21 October 2026 through DropCatch.com 983 LLC, with NameBright nameservers and an October 2027 expiry. A domain that had been continuously renewed since 2011 does not suddenly carry a 2026 creation date unless the original registration lapsed and the name was caught at auction.

The site confirms the state. On 6 November 2026, whatrunswhere.com returned a NameBright "Coming Soon" parking page over plain HTTP, and the HTTPS endpoint timed out before serving a certificate. There is no login, no pricing page, and no way to buy the old subscription.

That ending was a long time coming. Pathmatics bought WhatRunsWhere on 23 November 2016, a deal covered by MarTech and recorded on Crunchbase, and ran it as a smaller-advertiser product alongside its enterprise platform. Sensor Tower then acquired Pathmatics on 24 May 2021, per Sensor Tower's own announcement, which folded the display, social and spend-estimation data into an enterprise sales motion.

So the product did not fail. It was absorbed. The data lives on under a different name and a different buying motion, meaning a quote, a sales call and an annual contract. That is why any replacement decision in 2026 is really a question about what you want to do with the data, not about which logo is closest.

Is WhatRunsWhere still available in 2026?

No. There is no self-serve WhatRunsWhere subscription to buy in November 2026. The domain shows a parking page, the old pricing page is gone, and the corporate lineage now points at Sensor Tower's digital advertising product, which is sold by quote rather than by card.

This matters because most pages ranking for this query still describe the tool as live, with a $299 entry plan. Those pages were accurate in 2020. They are stale now, and a buyer who follows them spends an afternoon chasing a checkout that no longer exists.

One caveat, stated plainly. A parked domain proves the website is gone. It does not prove that a handful of legacy enterprise contracts stopped being serviced. If you already hold a contract, ask your account contact. If you are starting fresh, there is nothing to buy.

What did WhatRunsWhere actually do well?

Two things, and both are still worth paying for somewhere else.

Publisher-level display data. It told you which domains and ad networks carried a competitor's banner, not just what the banner looked like. That is a different question from "which ad is running", and it is the question buyers on the open web actually care about.

An affiliate filter. You could narrow results to campaigns that looked like affiliate offers, which made the tool popular with performance marketers buying display and native traffic through networks rather than through Meta or Google.

The Full Coverage tier added mobile web on top of desktop and native. If native is your channel, the decision framework in our guide to what a native ads spy tool returns maps onto the same job, network by network.

What it never did well was social creative analysis. It was not a Facebook or TikTok tool and it did not age into one.

That gap is why so many AdSpy comparisons exist in the first place, and why the network-by-network split in our breakdown of what ad spy tools actually return is the more useful way to shop for a replacement.

How much did WhatRunsWhere cost before it went dark?

The last public price card, archived from October 2020, listed Basic at $299 a month or $2,990 a year for desktop and native, and Full Coverage at $399 a month or $3,990 a year with mobile added. Enterprise was quoted, and from 2022 the page dropped numbers entirely in favour of a contact form.

Third-party directories carried the same figures forward without noticing the vendor had stopped selling. ITQlick's page, updated 11 February 2026, still lists $299 and $399, and a comparison page timestamped 22 August 2026 lists the same two tiers.

Use $3,600 a year as your benchmark, because that is roughly what a year on a premium display database cost at the entry tier. Every replacement below is cheaper per month than the old Basic plan, and two are cheaper per year.

Which WhatRunsWhere alternative fits your job?

Pick by job, not by feature checklist. Five jobs drove most of the old subscriptions, and they do not share a best answer.

Publisher and placement research. You want to know which sites carried a competitor's display creative. Adbeat is the closest like-for-like swap, because it keeps publisher placements and network attribution rather than only creative.

Affiliate and mobile traffic research. You want landing pages, offers and redirect chains by traffic source. AdPlexity sells each traffic source as its own product, which is a different budget shape from a single seat. Our AdPlexity pricing breakdown covers what each module costs before you commit to a bundle.

Native and push network research. You want Taboola, Outbrain and MGID placements with landing page capture, sold in modules so you only pay for the channel you buy.

Enterprise spend estimation. You want modelled spend and cross-channel share of voice for a brand, delivered as market data rather than as a browsing tool. That is Sensor Tower's digital advertising product now, sold by quote.

Ad library data an agent can query. You want structured creative records from Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn that a script or an MCP client can read, rank and summarise without a human clicking through a dashboard. That is what adextract does, and it is a different shape of product rather than a cheaper version of the old one.

How much do the replacements cost per month?

Figures below are published entry points, checked in November 2026. Vendor pricing moves, so confirm at checkout before you budget a year.

Adbeat. $249 a month for Standard and $399 for Advanced, read from adbeat.com/pricing on 6 November 2026. Standard covers desktop display, programmatic and native with 90 days of history, and Advanced adds pre-roll video. It is the closest one-for-one swap for the old Basic and Full Coverage shapes.

AdPlexity. $199 a month per traffic source, with native at $249 and yearly billing bringing those to roughly $166 and $208. Four products mean four subscriptions, which is the trap to check before you commit.

Anstrex. $79.99 a month for native, $89.99 for push, $89.99 for pops, and $39.99 for TikTok in-stream, with a free dropship module. Modular pricing lets you start on one channel instead of buying a suite.

Sensor Tower, formerly Pathmatics. Quote only, no public rate card. Budget for enterprise procurement, not for a single media buyer with a card.

adextract. 50 free credits on sign-up, then one credit per tool call on pay-as-you-go terms, billed per query rather than per seat per month. For a team running weekly competitor checks, that is usually a fraction of what a $249 seat costs.

How do you migrate a WhatRunsWhere workflow in an afternoon?

The old subscriptions supported a weekly ritual more than a daily habit. Rebuild the ritual in five steps and you will know within a day which replacement deserves a budget line.

Step 1, list the competitors you actually checked. Not the market map, the ten names someone typed into WhatRunsWhere last quarter. That list is your test set.

Step 2, write down the three questions you asked. In practice they were "who is running display", "where are they buying it" and "what changed since last week". Each question has a different best vendor.

Step 3, pull one week of data twice. Once on Monday, once on Friday. The difference between the two pulls is the only honest measure of refresh rate, and it is the number vendors never publish.

Step 4, check whether the export is usable. If the output is a screenshot or a PDF, your analyst is the API. If it is JSON you can hit from a script, you can automate the report that used to take an hour.

Step 5, price the seat against the ritual. A $249 seat used for one weekly check costs more per check than a metered query used for the same check. Do that arithmetic before you sign an annual term.

Why the replacement should be readable by an agent, not just by you

This category looks unsettled in 2026 not because spy tools got worse, but because the interface moved. People increasingly ask an assistant what a competitor is running this week and expect a structured answer, which means the data has to arrive as records an agent can read rather than as a dashboard a human has to browse.

Worldwide advertising spending is forecast at US$1.246 trillion in 2026, according to Statista's Advertising Market Forecast (retrieved 6 November 2026). The volume of creative to sift is not shrinking, and neither is the cost of sifting it by hand.

That is the practical argument for a data layer. The distinction between a browsing tool and a data source is the same one we draw in comparing an ad intelligence API with the Meta Ad Library API, where the question is how much of the answer a machine can assemble without you.

WhatRunsWhere's lineage makes this awkward. Its data ended up inside an enterprise platform sold by quote, so the small-team workflow that made the tool popular has no successor at the same altitude. The replacement you pick should shorten the path from question to structured answer, not lengthen it.

What should you verify before you pay for any ad intelligence tool?

Five checks that catch most of the disappointment, ordered by how much money they save you.

Check coverage against your channel, not against the headline network count. A database with 500 networks is worth nothing if your spend is on Meta and TikTok, and a Meta-first tool is worth nothing if you buy native traffic.

Check the refresh rate yourself. Two pulls, two days apart, diffed. Every other freshness claim is marketing.

Check the terms of the data. If the vendor resells crawled data, ask what happens to your workflow when a platform changes its access rules, as Meta and Google both have.

Check whether the product monitors or only searches. Monitoring implies alerts and change detection, and our notes on what to look for in a competitor ad monitoring tool are a fair test of that difference.

Ask what an export looks like. If the answer is that you can view it in the dashboard, you have bought a browser rather than a data source.

The honest summary: WhatRunsWhere is not coming back as a self-serve product, the replacement market is split by channel, and the decision that actually matters is whether you are buying a dashboard for a person or a data source for an agent.

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