Licenses expire. Campaigns end. Usage doesn't stop by itself. Brands don't notify you when your 90-day window lapses and the ad keeps running — the overrun just quietly happens, and it's money you're owed. Here are five ways to find out what's actually running with your content in it, from free-and-manual to automatic.
1. The platform ad libraries (free, 10 minutes, do this today)
Meta's Ad Library and TikTok's ad transparency tools let you search a brand's currently running ads. Search every brand you've ever delivered content to, and check what's live against what they licensed. This catches the single most common overrun — the expired paid-usage window — and gives you the ad IDs as evidence in the same step.
2. Reverse image search on your deliverables
Google Lens and TinEye find re-uses of still images across the open web — brand sites, product pages, third-party shops. Weaknesses: they index slowly, miss most social content, and struggle with video. For video, search your own keyframes (screenshot 3–4 distinctive frames and search those) — covers claim more than a single thumbnail search.
3. Search your own captions and campaign phrases
Brands reusing creator content often reuse the caption or hook line too. Exact-phrase searches for your distinctive lines surface reposts that image search misses entirely.
4. Watch your tagged/mention feeds — and your DMs
Your audience is a distributed monitoring network: most creators learn about big overruns from a follower asking "is this ad yours?". Check mention feeds systematically, not incidentally.
5. Automated monitoring on a watermark (what the manual methods miss)
All four manual methods share the same failure modes: they cost hours per month, they can't reliably match modified copies (cropped verticals, re-edits, AI-upscaled versions), and they can't prove a match is your file rather than something similar. This is the gap invisible watermarking closes: if every deliverable carries an embedded signature, a scanner can both find and verify copies — even after platform re-encodes and AI modification (here's exactly what survives).
That's the HALLMARK.AI workflow: MARK (free) embeds the watermark in everything you deliver; TRACK ($29/month) monitors brand sites and platforms for your content and alerts you with the evidence attached — the URL, the match, and the recovered signature that makes it provable rather than arguable.
What to do when you find something
Document first (screen-record, save ad IDs), then follow the escalation path for unlicensed brand use — in most cases that's a retroactive license invoice, not a lawsuit.