How we make the count
Every number on the census comes from one place and one set of rules. Here they are, so you can check any number yourself.
Where the ads come from
Meta's public ad library. It shows the ads running on Facebook and Instagram in the United States. On a busy page it does not show every one, so a big page can read low. It shows the text, the button, the picture, and the day the ad started. It does not show spend, clicks or results.
We ask each advertiser page for its ads by the page's own id. We never count what a keyword search returns. A keyword search finds a page. It does not count the page. In the 2026-W41 bath edition, one page returned 72 live ads by keyword. The same page returned 350 by direct query, the same day.
How a page gets on the roster
Each month we run 56 keyword searches for the bath trade. They turn up pages. A person reads each page's ads and marks it in the trade or out. A proposal from the code is not a verdict. Nothing counts until a person has said so. The rule is written down and the same every month.
In the 2026-W41 bath edition the roster held 241 pages a person had marked in the trade. This run queried 241 of them. Pages marked after a run count from the next edition. Pages nobody has marked never count.
The three units
A creative is one ad. A page is what Meta returns. A company is what you would call one business. One company can run several pages. Every table says which unit it counted.
Two franchise systems run in this trade. A location page under a brand counts as its own company unless something on the page says otherwise.
What the words mean
Live: the library reported the ad as active on the day we captured it. Age: days since the start date the library reports. Age describes what was live on one day. It is not a survival rate, because a long-running ad is live on more days. Survival prints only when the same pages appear in two counts in a row, and only on the pages the library showed in full both times.
Promises a free estimate: the ad text has the word "free" close to "consultation", "estimate", "quote" or "design". Close means within 25 characters. We count it once per company, however many ads say it.
Lets you book one: the ad's button is "Book now". We count it once per company. Whether the page behind the button can take a time is a separate read. We do that by hand, and it is not in the census.
Every other promise on the census is a written rule of the same kind. The rule text sits next to each number in the data file.
What we leave out
Pages the keyword sweep returned that nobody has marked. Any ad the library did not return. Advertisers outside the United States. Everything off Meta. Spend, clicks and results, because the library never shows them. We name no company anywhere on the census.
What we keep
We publish counts and our own writing, never an advertiser's ad text or picture. Anyone can check a company's live ads in Meta's public Ad Library. From mid-September on, we save every ad's picture the day we capture it. The library's picture links stop working within days. Two ads that share one picture share one file. A link that fails counts as dead. We do not retry it.
Whose data this is
Everything here comes from Meta's public Ad Library, which shows anyone the live ads on a page, and from opening the page an ad points at once, on a phone, with nothing submitted. We publish counts. We name no company. A reading of one page goes only to the person who asked about that page. If you run a page and would rather it were left out of the count, write to [email protected] with the page and one word, and from the next edition it is out. Its past counts stay in the editions already published, because a published number is not unpublished. If your own name appears anywhere in what we hold, write to [email protected] and we delete it.
When a number is wrong
We change it and say so. The corrections page lists every number we published and later changed. Each entry carries the date, the cause and the size of the change. Since the first correction, every run re-reads every page we track against the country and trade rules. Then we publish.
Still open
Two things are a person's judgment and not yet a written rule. What counts as "in the trade" for a page that sells several things. And whether a landing page can take a time, which the hand-read teardowns check and the census does not. Both are still open, and we say so wherever they matter.
The 2026-W41 bath edition, counted on 8 October 2026: 210 companies, 219 pages, 6,912 live creatives. Read the edition.