The Form 497AD Files Dataset is a complete archive of investment company advertising materials filed on EDGAR under Rule 482 of the Securities Act of 1933 and submitted via Rule 497. Each record represents a single 497AD submission — one Rule 482 advertisement that a registered investment company or business development company (BDC) treats as a Section 10(b) prospectus — packaged as a folder containing the EDGAR header in metadata.json and the primary advertising document as filed (HTML or PDF). The legal filer is always the issuer or registrant: open-end mutual funds, closed-end funds, ETFs, unit investment trusts, variable insurance separate accounts, and BDCs. Filings are event-driven, generated whenever the registrant publishes or distributes Rule 482 advertising rather than on a periodic schedule. The dataset covers all 497AD filings submitted to EDGAR from February 2000 to the present, organized into monthly ZIP containers.
Programmatically retrieve the full list of dataset archive files, download URLs and dataset metadata.
Dataset Index JSON API
Download the entire dataset as a single archive file.
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Download a single container file (e.g. monthly archive) from the dataset.
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The dataset contains every Form 497AD submission accepted by EDGAR from February 2000 forward. Form 497AD is the EDGAR submission type that registered investment companies and BDCs use to file advertising materials qualifying as Section 10(b) prospectuses under Rule 482 of the Securities Act of 1933. Rule 482 permits a fund to publish standardized performance and substantive prospectus-style advertising outside the statutory prospectus, provided the advertisement carries specific disclosures: a legend identifying the document as an advertisement, instructions to consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses and to obtain the prospectus, standardized return calculations whenever performance is shown, and required risk language. Rule 497 governs how those advertisements are filed with the SEC, and the "AD" suffix on the form code distinguishes Rule 482 advertising filings from sibling Rule 497 sub-types such as 497K (summary prospectus) and 497J (certification).
A Form 497AD filing is neither a prospectus nor a periodic report — it is an advertising artifact submitted for SEC oversight. Substantive content takes whatever shape the fund's marketing requires: a one-page fact sheet, a press release, a monthly performance update, a multi-page investor presentation, a tombstone announcement, a NAV notice, a rights-offering announcement, or a fund tear sheet, accompanied by the legends and disclosures Rule 482(c) mandates. The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers; inside each container, every record is a folder named with the dash-stripped 18-digit accession number (for example 000199937125020576/). File types found in the dataset are JSON, HTM/HTML, PDF, and (rarely, in early-2000s filings) TXT.
One record in the Form 497AD Files Dataset is a single Form 497AD submission to EDGAR, identified by its SEC accession number and packaged as one folder inside a monthly ZIP container. Each record bundles two pieces of content: a metadata.json file capturing the EDGAR submission header, the filer entity block, and the full document manifest, plus the primary advertising document itself (HTML or PDF) exactly as the filer submitted it. A record therefore captures one Rule 482 advertising filing as a self-contained unit: the EDGAR header in machine-readable form, plus the rendered marketing document a fund company actually disseminated to investors.
A record has two layers:
metadata.json. This carries the filing header, the canonical accession number, all timestamps, the filer entity block, and the manifest of every document attached to the original EDGAR submission (including images that are excluded from the local package).Each record folder contains exactly one metadata.json and one primary 497AD document. Image attachments (JPG, GIF) that the original submission referenced and that the manifest enumerates are intentionally excluded from the dataset; only the primary advertising document and the metadata travel with each record.
metadata.jsonThis file mirrors the EDGAR header for the submission and is the structured anchor of the record. The top-level fields are:
formType — fixed at "497AD" for every record in this dataset.accessionNo — canonical SEC accession number with dashes (for example "0001999371-25-020576"); equals the folder name with dashes stripped.linkToFilingDetails — absolute URL of the primary advertising document on www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/..., identical to the file shipped next to metadata.json.description — fixed EDGAR boilerplate: "Form 497AD - Filing by certain investment companies of Rule 482 advertising [Rule 497 and 482(c)]".linkToTxt — URL of the complete-submission SGML text file (<accession>.txt) that wraps every document of the original submission.linkToHtml — URL of the EDGAR filing index page (<accession>-index.htm).linkToXbrl — empty string. 497AD filings carry no XBRL.filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with Eastern-time offset, for example "2025-12-17T21:03:31-05:00". Reflects the EDGAR acceptance time, not the date of dissemination to investors.id — 32-character hexadecimal record identifier.documentFormatFiles — array enumerating every document attached to the EDGAR submission (see below).entities — array of filer entity records (see below).seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — array reserved for fund series/class information; typically empty for 497AD.dataFiles — array reserved for structured data files; typically empty for 497AD.documentFormatFiles[]This array is the EDGAR document manifest for the submission. It enumerates every document the filer attached, regardless of whether the dataset ships it locally. Each entry has:
sequence — string, usually "1", "2", …; the bundled complete-submission TXT entry uses a literal space.size — file size in bytes as a string.documentUrl — absolute URL to the document on EDGAR.type — EDGAR document type. The primary advertisement is "497AD"; image attachments are "GRAPHIC"; the bundled complete-submission file uses a space.description — optional free-text label such as "FORM 497AD", "GRAPHIC", a fund-name caption (for example "BLACKROCK CORPORATE HIGH YIELD FUND (HYT)"), or "Complete submission text file".The sequence: "1" entry is always the primary 497AD advertisement and is the file that accompanies metadata.json in the local folder. Subsequent GRAPHIC entries (typically JPG or GIF images embedded in the advertisement) are documented in the manifest but deliberately omitted from the dataset package; their documentUrl values point at www.sec.gov and can be used to retrieve the originals on demand.
entities[]One element per filer associated with the submission. For 497AD filings this is normally a single registered investment company or BDC. Observed keys:
companyName — filer name with the role suffix in parentheses, for example "Ellington Credit Co (Filer)".cik — Central Index Key as a numeric string.irsNo — IRS employer identification number; sometimes "000000000" when not reported.fileNo — SEC file number associated with the registration statement (for example "333-275162"); occasionally absent.filmNo — EDGAR film number assigned at acceptance.act — Securities Act indicator, typically "33".type — entity-level filing type, mirrors formType ("497AD").sic — Standard Industrial Classification code with description, for example "6798 Real Estate Investment Trusts".stateOfIncorporation — two-letter state code such as "DE" or "MD".fiscalYearEnd — four-digit MMDD encoding ("0331", "1231").tickers — array of one or more exchange-listed symbols (for example ["EARN", "ELLA"], ["CCIF", "CCID", "VCIF"]) when the issuer's shares are listed; absent when the issuer has no listed equity.The advertising document is the substantive payload of the record. It exists in one of two physical formats inside the dataset.
HTML primary documents. When the filer submitted the advertisement as HTML, the file shipped in the folder is not raw HTML but the EDGAR per-document SGML wrapper containing the HTML inside a <TEXT> block. The wrapper opens with the document-level header tags, then opens <TEXT> followed by the actual <HTML> payload, and closes with </TEXT></DOCUMENT>:
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<DOCUMENT>
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<TYPE>497AD
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<SEQUENCE>1
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<FILENAME>nav-497ad.htm
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<DESCRIPTION>FORM 497AD
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<TEXT>
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<HTML>
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<HEAD>
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<TITLE></TITLE>
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</HEAD>
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<BODY STYLE="font: 10pt Times New Roman, Times, Serif">
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... (full HTML markup of the Rule 482 advertisement, including text,
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tables, and <IMG SRC="..."> references to GRAPHIC attachments) ...
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</BODY>
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</HTML>
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</TEXT>
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</DOCUMENT>
The HTML body holds the advertisement's full markup — narrative paragraphs, performance and fee tables, the Rule 482 legend, and <IMG SRC="..."> references to the JPG or GIF graphics that exist on EDGAR but are not bundled locally. Some filer agents (for example Broadridge PROfile) inject identifying comments into <head>; otherwise the inner HTML is the as-filed marketing piece.
PDF primary documents. When the filer submitted the advertisement as PDF, the file is a standard binary PDF (%PDF-1.x header) with no SGML wrapper. PDFs are typical for multi-page glossy investor reports, monthly portfolio updates, and full investor presentations.
Filename conventions are filer-driven and not enforced. Common patterns include the boilerplate form497ad.htm; descriptive slugs such as distressed-497ad_11302025.htm, longshort-497ad_11302025.htm, or arbitrage-497ad_11302025.htm; agent-document identifiers such as c114543_497ad.htm, tm2533698d1_497ad.pdf, or o121255497ad.htm; and free-form names like nav-497ad.htm, occiinvestorpresentation.htm, or ccifmonthlyreportnovember2.pdf.
Although Rule 482 does not prescribe a fixed layout, advertising content typically includes some combination of:
Common record archetypes encountered across the dataset include net asset value notices and monthly snapshots, multi-page fund fact sheets and tear sheets, press releases announcing rights offerings or distributions, full investor presentations exported to HTML or PDF, and monthly portfolio reports for closed-end credit and BDC vehicles.
Each record folder contains:
metadata.json with the full EDGAR header, document manifest, and filer entity block.sequence: "1" entry in the manifest and to linkToFilingDetails.The file types found in the dataset are JSON, HTM/HTML, PDF, and (rarely, in early 2000s filings) TXT. In practice, every folder contains a JSON manifest plus a single primary document that is overwhelmingly HTML or PDF.
documentFormatFiles with type: "GRAPHIC" are not shipped locally. Their absolute EDGAR URLs are preserved in the manifest, and HTML primary documents retain the original <IMG SRC="..."> references that point to those images.<accession>.txt SGML bundle that wraps every document of the original EDGAR submission is referenced via linkToTxt but is not shipped locally. The per-document SGML wrapper around HTML primary documents preserves the document-level header information that would otherwise be reconstructed from the bundle.<accession>-index.htm page is referenced via linkToHtml but not shipped.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation and dataFiles arrays are present but typically empty for 497AD submissions, since these filings do not carry per-series structured data.Form 497AD has been a stable EDGAR submission type since the Rule 482 advertising regime was integrated with EDGAR filing requirements. The dataset spans February 2000 to present, and over that window the content of a 497AD filing has been shaped by SEC rulemaking rather than by changes to the form code itself.
The structure of metadata.json reflects EDGAR's header schema and is consistent across records. The set of populated entity fields varies with the issuer (for example, tickers appears for listed closed-end funds and BDCs and is absent for unlisted open-end funds).
Form 497AD has effectively always been filed as either HTML or PDF on EDGAR within the period covered by this dataset. HTML predominates for shorter advertisements (legends, NAV notices, press releases, simple fact sheets); PDF predominates for longer glossy presentations and multi-page portfolio reports. EDGAR's per-document SGML wrapping convention applies uniformly to HTML 497AD documents throughout the dataset window: the <DOCUMENT> / <TYPE> / <SEQUENCE> / <FILENAME> / <DESCRIPTION> / <TEXT> header structure precedes the HTML payload regardless of filing year. PDFs are shipped as standalone binary files without the SGML wrapper.
Plain-text 497AD documents appeared rarely in the early years of the dataset (early 2000s) before HTML and PDF became universal practice. XBRL has never been applicable to Form 497AD; the linkToXbrl field is consistently empty and no structured financial-tagging layer exists for advertising filings.
metadata.json -> accessionNo retains the dashed form. Either can be used to join records to other EDGAR-keyed datasets, but normalization is required.documentFormatFiles is the authoritative manifest of the original EDGAR submission and lists more files than the dataset ships. Any consumer reconstructing the full submission must follow the documentUrl values for GRAPHIC entries to retrieve images from EDGAR; the dataset's omission of images is deliberate.<DOCUMENT> / <TYPE> / <SEQUENCE> / <FILENAME> / <DESCRIPTION> / <TEXT> lines (and the trailing </TEXT></DOCUMENT>) before treating the file as standalone HTML. The HTML payload itself begins at the first <HTML> tag inside the <TEXT> block.<IMG> tags inside HTML primary documents reference paths that do not exist in the local folder. Faithful rendering requires either fetching the images from the EDGAR URLs in the manifest or accepting broken image references.entities array supports multiple entries, but 497AD submissions almost always involve a single filer. When more than one entity is present, their roles can be inferred from the (Filer) / (Subject) suffix in companyName.tickers; unlisted open-end mutual funds typically do not, so the absence of tickers is a meaningful signal rather than a missing-data anomaly.filedAt records EDGAR acceptance, not the date the advertisement was originally disseminated to investors. Many advertisements (monthly reports, fact sheets) carry an internal "as of" date inside the document body that may differ from filedAt.Form 497AD is filed on EDGAR by the registrant of an investment company or business development company to place a piece of advertising or sales material on the public record as a Section 10(b) of the Securities Act prospectus under the Securities Act of 1933. The legal filer is always the issuer/registrant, even though the advertisement is typically drafted by the fund's investment adviser, principal underwriter, distributor, or marketing agency, and is often reviewed in parallel by FINRA's Advertising Regulation Department under FINRA Rule 2210.
Eligible filer classes include:
Broker-dealers, registered representatives, financial advisers, third-party media outlets, and marketing agencies do not themselves file 497AD. Operating-company issuers and foreign private issuers also do not use this form; their marketing communications are governed by Rules 134, 163, 163A, 164, and 433 (free writing prospectuses), not by Rule 482 / Rule 497.
The filing is event-driven, not periodic. There is no annual or quarterly cadence and no fiscal-year tie. A 497AD record is generated whenever the registrant distributes, publishes, or first uses an advertising or sales communication that it intends to qualify as a Section 10(b) prospectus under Rule 482, rather than as a Section 10(a) statutory prospectus.
The triggering content is typically an advertisement, supplemental sales literature, or omitting prospectus that goes beyond the limited "tombstone" content permitted by Rule 134, including performance data, fee and expense information, descriptions of investment objectives or strategies, or ranking information.
Rule 497 requires the material to be filed with the Commission no later than the date of first use:
The regulatory stack: Section 10(b) of the Securities Act authorizes a summary prospectus form; Rule 482 prescribes the substantive content rules (standardized performance, required legends, risk disclosures); Rule 497 is the procedural filing rule, with subsection 497(i) covering investment company advertising. The 497AD submission type became available on EDGAR in the late 1990s, with the earliest records in this dataset dating from February 2000. Earlier Rule 482 advertisements (Rule 482 was adopted in 1979) were filed in paper.
Form 497AD sits in a tight cluster of investment company offering and marketing filings. The most useful comparisons are the other Rule 497 submission types, the registration forms that authorize what a fund may say, and the parallel free writing prospectus regime used by operating-company issuers.
Both are filed under Rule 497 by registered investment companies, which is the main source of confusion. The content differs sharply.
Use 497 for authoritative disclosure language; use 497AD for marketing language and performance advertising.
497K is the Rule 498 summary prospectus: a structured, item-by-item document (objective, fees, strategies, risks, performance, management) that can substitute for statutory prospectus delivery. Form 497K has no required structure and cannot satisfy delivery; it is supplemental sales material governed by Rule 482's legend, standardized-performance, and anti-misleading rules. Both are short, but 497K is a delivery substitute and 497AD is not.
Registration statements establish the fund and define the disclosure baseline that all marketing must reconcile to. 497AD is downstream: a fund cannot file Rule 482 advertising before an effective registration. Registrations are broad and legal (Parts A, B, C with exhibits, consents, powers of attorney); 497AD filings are short, promotional, and selective. Use registrations for authoritative strategy, fee, board, and policy terms; use 497AD for the marketing layer built on top.
The closest non-fund analogue. Both are written offering communications outside the statutory prospectus that must be filed with the SEC, but the regimes do not overlap:
Legends, performance rules, and conditioning-the-market doctrines differ. The two datasets are not interchangeable even though both contain offering-related promotional content.
Same filer population, different purpose. Form 24F-2 reports shares sold for fee calculation; N-CSR is the certified shareholder report; N-PORT carries portfolio holdings. None contain advertising. They are useful as complements (what a fund advertised vs. what it held or reported) but never substitutes.
Often listed alongside 497AD as "non-prospectus communications," but the overlap is superficial. Form 425 covers M&A communications and DEF 14A covers proxy solicitations; 497AD covers ongoing offering-side advertising of fund shares. No meaningful content overlap.
Form 497AD is distinct on three axes at once: filer population (registered funds and BDCs only), regulatory basis (Rule 482 advertising filed via Rule 497), and content type (sales and marketing material rather than statutory disclosure). Form 497 holds the offering document, 497K holds the structured summary, N-1A/N-2 hold the registration, and FWP holds the analogous marketing layer for non-fund issuers. None of these substitute for 497AD when the research question is how funds actually market themselves, including performance claims, risk legends, and visual presentation. Conversely, 497AD should never be cited for authoritative fund terms; advertisements are abbreviated by design and the controlling text remains the prospectus or registration.
The Form 497AD Files Dataset is used by professionals in advertising compliance, fund marketing, examination, litigation, and quantitative research who need to see the exact ad copy, performance tables, fee statements, legends, and risk language as filed.
Compliance staff at advisers to mutual funds, ETFs, closed-end funds, and BDCs use the corpus as a working reference for how Rule 482 ads are constructed across the industry. They focus on legend language, standardized 1/5/10-year and since-inception performance tables, yield and distribution-rate wording, and risk-warning placement. The dataset feeds advertising review checklists, training, and pre-clearance workflows.
In-house and outside counsel drafting Rule 482 ads pull historical filings to benchmark phrasing for performance qualifications, hypothetical illustrations, ESG claims, target-date glide-path descriptions, expense-waiver disclosures, subsidized vs. unsubsidized yield, tax-equivalent yield, and BDC distribution-rate language. Accepted peer phrasings shorten drafting cycles.
Marketing strategists, product managers, and creative directors track competitor positioning: which products peers are actively promoting, which performance windows and benchmarks they emphasize, and how income, growth, ESG, or factor narratives are framed. The text and embedded performance and fee data inform campaign briefs, claims architecture, and message testing.
Examiners reviewing fund advertising treat 497AD filings as primary source material when checking required legends, standardized performance, fee context, and risk language, and when assessing the proximity of risk statements to performance claims. The corpus supports sweep exams, cross-family comparative reviews, and enforcement referrals. Broker-dealer supervisory analysts use the same filings to confirm that retail communications distributed by registered representatives match a properly filed ad.
Third-party administrators that review and file marketing on behalf of fund clients rely on prior 497AD filings to standardize templates, verify legends against current requirements, and confirm advertised performance ties to official records. The dataset feeds template libraries, QA processes, and client compliance memos.
CI analysts at fund sponsors aggregate filings by sponsor, fund category, asset class, and time period to track advertising cadence, detect competitor pushes into new categories, and correlate marketing emphasis with performance and flow shifts.
Plaintiffs' attorneys investigating misleading marketing or performance misrepresentation use the exact ad language, legend prominence, and consistency with contemporaneous prospectus disclosures as evidentiary material for complaints, discovery, and expert reports. Defense counsel use the same filings to demonstrate industry norms and benchmark a client's language against peer practice in enforcement matters.
Consultants advising fund complexes during marketing-rule transitions or performance-presentation changes use the dataset to map how the industry has implemented updated requirements, producing gap analyses, training materials, and remediation roadmaps grounded in observed filing practice.
Researchers studying performance chasing, fee salience, risk framing, advertising intensity vs. fund flows, and disclosure-language evolution use the multi-decade archive for longitudinal studies, textual analysis, and event studies linking ad activity to flows or pricing.
Engineering teams building compliance surveillance tools and LLM assistants for asset management ingest 497AD filings to train and evaluate models that classify marketing language, extract performance and fee figures, detect missing legends, and flag potentially noncompliant claims. The mix of text, HTML, and PDF makes the archive useful training material for real-world fund-marketing layouts.
State-level examiners reviewing fund advertising directed at residents corroborate complaints, monitor advertising trends, and coordinate with federal staff on cross-jurisdictional concerns.
The dataset is narrow in regulatory scope but broad in professional relevance. Compliance, legal, marketing, examination, litigation, consulting, academic, and data-engineering users each focus on different elements of the record — legend, performance table, fee disclosure, risk language, or body copy — and the combination of full submission documents and metadata makes those workflows tractable at scale.
The following workflows are grounded in what 497AD records actually contain: the Rule 482 legend, standardized 1/5/10-year and 30-day SEC yield tables, fee and expense language, risk disclosures, and the filer entity block in metadata.json.
Building a Rule 482 legend and disclosure compliance corpus. Parse the HTML and PDF primary documents to extract the advertising legend, the "consider investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses" instruction, and forward-looking-statement language. Compare against current SEC requirements to flag missing or stale legends, and feed the labeled examples into pre-clearance review checklists and CCO training decks.
Benchmarking peer performance presentation across closed-end funds and BDCs. Filter records by entities[].sic and tickers to isolate listed CEFs and BDCs, then extract the standardized performance tables, distribution-rate disclosures, and subsidized vs. unsubsidized yield wording from the advertising body. Use the resulting peer set when drafting a new fact sheet or monthly report so phrasing for performance qualifications and yield context aligns with accepted industry practice.
Tracking competitor advertising cadence and category pushes. Aggregate filedAt timestamps and entities[].companyName across months to measure each sponsor's 497AD volume by fund family and asset class. Spikes signal active campaigns, new product launches, or rights offerings; the manifest's description captions and document filenames (for example distressed-497ad_*.htm, rights-offering press releases) reveal which strategies a competitor is pushing this quarter.
Training NLP models on real-world fund marketing layouts. Use the mix of SGML-wrapped HTML and standalone PDF documents as labeled training data for classifiers that detect missing legends, extract performance and expense figures from rendered tables, and tag risk-warning proximity to performance claims. The multi-decade span supports evaluation across pre- and post-2003 Rule 482 amendment language.
Evidentiary support in fund-marketing litigation and enforcement. Pull the exact 497AD primary document for a contested ad and pair it with metadata.json to anchor the accession number, filedAt, and filer CIK. Compare advertising language and legend prominence against the contemporaneous statutory prospectus (Form 497) for the same issuer to demonstrate consistency or identify departures cited in misleading-marketing complaints, expert reports, and FINRA referrals.
Reconstructing rights-offering and distribution announcement timelines. For a target closed-end fund or BDC, sequence its 497AD filings by filedAt and isolate press-release-style documents announcing rights offerings, NAV updates, and distribution declarations. The result is a clean event timeline of issuer marketing communications usable in event studies linking advertising activity to share price or flow movements.
Auditing template consistency across an outsourced administrator's client book. Group records by filer agent fingerprints (for example Broadridge PROfile comments injected into HTML <head>) and by entities[].cik to compare legend, fee, and risk template versions across funds sharing one administrator. Surface drift between client templates and current Rule 482 requirements for remediation memos and template-library updates.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-497ad-files.json
This endpoint returns dataset-level metadata (name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date, total record count, total archive size, covered form types, container format, and file types), the download URL for the full dataset archive, and a list of all available container files with their individual sizes, record counts, updated timestamps, and download URLs. Poll this endpoint to monitor which containers were refreshed in the most recent run and decide which files to re-download on a daily basis. No API key is required to access this endpoint.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6946-9b10-2f43d820529b",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-497ad-files.zip",
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"name": "Form 497AD Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-29T03:00:05.090Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "2000-02-01",
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"totalRecords": 5629,
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"totalSize": 983092687,
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"formTypes": ["497AD"],
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"containerFormat": "ZIP",
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"fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON", "HTML", "PDF"],
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"containers": [
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{
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"downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-497ad-files/2026/2026-04.zip",
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"key": "2026/2026-04.zip",
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"size": 13818783,
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"records": 154,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-29T03:00:05.090Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-497ad-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing every monthly container from February 2000 to the present. This endpoint requires a valid API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-497ad-files/2026/2026-04.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Downloads one monthly container archive instead of the full dataset, which is useful for incremental updates or fetching a specific time range. Replace the year and month in the path to target other containers. This endpoint requires a valid API key.
The dataset covers Form 497AD, the EDGAR submission type used by registered investment companies and business development companies to file advertising materials qualifying as Section 10(b) prospectuses under Rule 482 of the Securities Act of 1933, submitted procedurally under Rule 497.
One record is a single Form 497AD submission to EDGAR, identified by its SEC accession number and packaged as a folder containing a metadata.json file (the EDGAR header, filer entity block, and document manifest) and the primary advertising document (HTML inside an SGML wrapper, or a standalone PDF) exactly as the filer submitted it.
The legal filer is always the issuer or registrant: open-end mutual funds, closed-end funds, ETFs, unit investment trusts, variable annuity and variable life separate accounts, and business development companies. Broker-dealers, financial advisers, marketing agencies, operating-company issuers, and foreign private issuers do not file 497AD.
The filing is event-driven, not periodic. A 497AD record is generated whenever the registrant publishes, transmits, or first uses a Rule 482 advertisement intended to qualify as a Section 10(b) prospectus. Rule 497 requires the material to be filed no later than the date of first use, and each new version of an advertisement generates a new accession (there is no "/A" amended variant).
The dataset includes all Form 497AD filings submitted to EDGAR from February 2000 to the present, organized into monthly ZIP containers. Earlier Rule 482 advertisements (Rule 482 was adopted in 1979) were filed in paper and are not part of the EDGAR archive.
Every record folder contains a JSON manifest (metadata.json) plus a single primary advertising document. The primary document is overwhelmingly HTML (wrapped in EDGAR's per-document SGML envelope) or a standalone binary PDF; plain TXT appears rarely in early-2000s filings. JPG and GIF image attachments referenced inside the advertisement are listed in the manifest but not bundled locally — their absolute EDGAR URLs are preserved for on-demand retrieval.
All three are filed under Rule 497 by registered investment companies, but they carry different content. Form 497 carries the definitive prospectus, SAI, or supplement — the legal offering document. Form 497J (certification) is a separate sub-type. Form 497K is the Rule 498 structured summary prospectus that can substitute for statutory prospectus delivery. Form 497AD carries Rule 482 advertising material (fact sheets, print ads, monthly reports, press releases) that is treated as a Section 10(b) prospectus but cannot satisfy delivery and has no required structure.