How to connect Claude to Google Ads

Before you start

• A Google account that already has access to the Google Ads account you care about. The connector inherits your access — it cannot reach anything you cannot.
• A Claude subscription. The reasoning happens in Claude, on your account. We supply the connector, not the model.
• No developer token, Google Cloud project or OAuth client. Those are needed to run a Google Ads MCP server yourself; a hosted one absorbs them.

The four steps

1. Sign in with Google. Start the pilot and sign in with the Google account that already has access to your Google Ads accounts. AdCopilot uses Google's own sign-in, so it inherits exactly the access you have and never sees your password.
2. Copy your private connector address. After sign-in you are given an address of the form https://mcp.adcopilot.cloud/c/<your key>/mcp. It is unique to you. Treat it like a password, because anyone holding it holds your access.
3. Add it to Claude as a custom connector. In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector. Give it a name such as AdCopilot and paste the address into the Remote MCP server URL field. Leave the optional OAuth client ID and secret blank — the key in the address is the credential.
4. Ask it something you already know the answer to. Start a new chat and ask Claude which Google Ads accounts it can see. It should list exactly the accounts your Google login can reach. That confirms the connection and calibrates your trust before anything is changed.

Claude Desktop and claude.ai

The path is the same in the desktop app and in the browser: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector. You are asked for two things.

• Name— anything you like. “AdCopilot” or “Google Ads” both work; it is what you will see in the tool list.
• Remote MCP server URL — your private address, ending in /mcp.

Under advanced settings you may see optional OAuth client ID and secret fields. Leave them blank. Save, start a new conversation, and the connector's tools appear in the tool menu.

https://mcp.adcopilot.cloud/c/<your key>/mcp

Claude Code

In the terminal, add it as an HTTP transport server. It is then available in any session started in that scope.

claude mcp add --transport http adcopilot https://mcp.adcopilot.cloud/c/<your key>/mcp

The same address works in any MCP client that speaks streamable HTTP — Gemini CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot. There is a ChatGPT walkthrough too.

Your first questions

Ask something you can verify. The point of the first five minutes is to calibrate your own trust, not to test the software.

• “Which Google Ads accounts can you see?”
• “What did we spend last month, by campaign?”
• “List search terms from the last 90 days that cost more than £50 and produced no conversions.”
• “Which ad groups have only one active ad?”
• “Show me every change made to this account in the last week.”

All of those work on the read-only tier, because reading is all they need. That last one is worth running before you enable writes, so you know what normal looks like.

Turning on changes

The pilot is read-only by default — three tools, none of which can alter anything. On the full tier Claude gains twenty-nine more: campaigns and Performance Max, ad groups, responsive search ads, keywords and negatives, assets and their links, geography, ad schedule and device bid adjustments.

It never gains deletion. The four destructive tools in the underlying server are removed from the hosted connector entirely, so a misread instruction has nothing to grab. The full list is on the MCP server page.

Withdrawing access

Three independent ways, and none of them depends on us being cooperative:

• From your Google account — the third-party access page lists AdCopilot; removing it cuts the credential off at the source.
• Delete the connector in Claude, which stops Claude calling it.
• Ask us to switch the address off, which is instant and takes effect on the next request.

If it doesn't connect

• Check the address ends in /mcp. A trailing slash or a missing suffix is the most common cause.
• Check you copied the whole key. It is long, and a truncated key looks exactly like a wrong one: the server refuses both identically, on purpose, so the error cannot be used to discover valid keys.
• If Claude connects but sees no accounts, the Google login you used probably does not have access to them. Check by signing in to Google Ads directly with the same account.
• If the tools you expect are missing, you are on the read-only tier — that is three tools, and it is the pilot default.

Frequently asked questions