About once a week someone asks whether ChatGPT can replace an ad spy tool. It is a fair question. ChatGPT is fast, cheap, and writes decent ad copy. But there is a hard limit on what it can do for competitive research, and it is worth being clear about it.
ChatGPT does not have a live feed of the Meta Ad Library. Ask it which ads Gymshark is running this week and it will either tell you it cannot browse, or worse, invent a plausible answer. It has no eyes on the market. Anything it says about a current campaign is a guess dressed up as a fact.
Where ChatGPT earns its keep is after you already have the raw material. Paste in a competitor's ad copy and it will break down the hook, the structure, and the offer in seconds. Give it ten winning headlines and it will spot the pattern and draft twenty more in that voice. As a thinking partner on creative you have already gathered, it is genuinely useful.
So the real workflow is two tools, not one. A tracker like Dibbin watches the market and tells you which competitor ads are live, how long they have run, and which ones are scaling. ChatGPT helps you take those winners apart and remix them. One finds the signal, the other helps you act on it. Asking ChatGPT alone to do competitor research is asking the wrong tool the right question.