There is a banner on most retail homepages that nobody thinks of as advertising. It says something like 20% off fall boots, or free installation this week, or buy one get one on selected items. Somebody on the ecommerce team put it up. Somebody else was supposed to take it down.
From Monday, October 12, Google Ads may start running that banner for you.
Google emailed some advertisers last week to say that, starting on that date, it “will automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions, such as coupons and deals, from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns.” Barry Schwartz published the email at Search Engine Roundtable on October 5, after Search Engine Land’s Anu Adegbola reported the plan on October 2. The feature is called automated promotions. It is on by default. The only off switch Google describes sits at the account level.
On its own this looks like one more automated asset, the kind of thing a paid search lead checks and moves on from. I think it is a bigger change than that, for a simple reason. It moves a piece of ad copy out of the ad account and onto the website, and most companies run those two places with different people, different calendars and different sign-off.
What Google is turning on
Here is the mechanism, from Google’s own help page. Google reads your landing pages, finds offers like “Buy one get one free” or “20% off on black sweaters,” and turns them into promotion assets. Those are the offer lines that show under a Search ad, with a discount and a short description. The help page says the sourced promotions “may serve alongside your ads on Google Search or across Google’s broader ad inventory.”
The scope is narrower than the headline. A campaign qualifies if it is an active Search or Performance Max campaign, has location assets attached, and has no manual promotions running. Location assets are the address and map details that usually come from a linked Business Profile. So the people most exposed are the businesses with physical locations: retailers with stores, restaurants, dealerships, clinics, gyms, home services, franchises. In other words, a lot of the advertisers who lean hardest on Q4 offers.
Google has not said which countries are covered. Relevant Audience noted there is no published market list, and nothing on how extraction handles pages that are not in English. The email itself, as PPC Land pointed out, went to “some advertisers,” and Google has not said how many.
It may already be running for some of them. Google published the help page in early September, and Schwartz described the feature as launched “some time ago,” with the October email working as Google’s notice of something that exists. Practitioners posting in September said they found the setting already switched on. So do not treat October 12 as the first possible day. Treat it as the latest.
The pen moved
Think about how an offer line used to get into a Search ad. Someone in paid media built a promotion asset by hand. They picked the discount type, typed the product, chose the dates, added a promo code or a minimum spend if there was one, and attached it to a campaign. Google’s manual setup asks for every one of those fields. It is a small piece of copy, but it went through the person who owns the ad account.
Automated promotions skips that person. The text starts on the website and travels into the ad. Relevant Audience put it well: a review process built around approving what a copywriter wrote does not touch this, because nobody in the account wrote it.
So who wrote it? Whoever edits the website. In a small business that might be the same person. In a mid-size retailer it is usually an ecommerce manager, a merchandiser, a web producer, sometimes an agency that manages the CMS. In a franchise or multi-location brand it can be dozens of people updating location pages. None of them think of themselves as writing paid search copy. As of Monday, in an eligible account, some of them are.
That is the real change. Your homepage promo slot just got a media budget, and the person who controls it may never log into Google Ads.
Where this goes wrong
Google says its “advanced verification ensures that only active, non-expired offers are shown.” The way it does that is worth reading closely. Each automated promotion is eligible to serve for less than 24 hours. After that, it can be switched back on “so long as our systems can continuously verify that the promotion is still visibly available on your website.” Google adds that this “is expected to change in the future when Google can extract promotion start and end dates.”
Read that again. Today Google cannot read your offer’s end date. It decides an offer is live because it is still visible on the page. Which means the page is the source of truth, and the page is exactly where offers go to die slowly.
You know the cases. A summer sale banner that nobody pulled in September. A first-order code in a pop-up. A trade price list on a page that looks public. An offer that only applies at two locations, stated on a page every location links to. A discount whose real conditions, a minimum spend, a list of excluded brands, live in a footnote or on a separate terms page. A banner can say “up to 40% off” and mean three products.
Each of those is a small mess on your own site. Put it in a paid ad shown to people searching for a store near them and it becomes a claim. Google’s misrepresentation policy is blunt about who owns that claim. It does not allow “promising products, services, or promotional offers in the ad that are unavailable or aren’t easily found from the destination,” and its examples include “promoting a deal that is no longer active” and “promoting a price that is inaccurate.” The policy does not say anything about who wrote the line. PPC Land also notes that Google’s updated terms, effective July 1, restate the advertiser’s responsibility to review, approve or remove automatically generated assets, though nothing published says outright whether that clause covers offers pulled from a site.
There is a cost angle too, and this part is my inference, not anything Google has said. A site banner is usually a conversion nudge for people already on your site. A promotion asset is an acquisition message shown to people who are still choosing. If the same discount suddenly reaches more people earlier in the journey, more of them will expect it, and some of them would have bought at full price. That is a margin decision. It should be made by the person who sets your promo budget, not by a parser.
The invisible part
Two reporting details make this harder to manage than a normal asset.
First, you only see what has already run. Google’s notice, quoted by Search Engine Land and PPC Land, says assets with zero impressions will not appear in the Assets view. Once a promotion serves, it shows up under Assets with “Google AI” in the Added by column, and you can hover to see where Google sourced it. But there is no queue to review in advance. The record is a receipt.
Second, Google’s account-level assets page describes the feature as sourcing deals “from your website and other sources.” It does not name the other sources. The dedicated help page talks only about your website. That gap may be nothing. It is still worth asking your rep about in writing, because “other sources” is a wide door.
Then there is measurement. Google’s own guidance asks you to judge the feature by “overall campaign impressions and conversions, as the broader campaign performance often improves significantly even if direct clicks on the specific promotion bubble appear low.” Maybe so. But if you are running anything you need to read cleanly in Q4, a creative test, a bid strategy change, an incrementality study, an asset Google added on its own and re-enables daily is an uncontrolled variable sitting inside your results. If performance moves in the second half of October, you want to know whether it was your plan or a banner.
This is a pattern, so treat it like one
None of this is unique to promotions. PPC Land lists a run of 2026 Google defaults that follow the same template: AI voice-over added to Performance Max video ads from March 20 unless you disabled it, a site visits asset that at launch could only be turned off through a Google rep, the AI Max upgrade of automatically created assets and broad match announced by email in August. Each change is small. Each is described as helpful. Each starts in the on position.
The useful response is not outrage, and it is not switching everything off. It is ownership. Every automated setting that can spend money or make a claim needs a named person who decided it. The default is a decision too. It is just one you did not make.
The two levers you actually have
Google gives you two controls, and they do different things.
The off switch is account-wide. In Google Ads, go to Assets, open Account level automated assets from the three-dot menu, then Advanced settings, and set Automated promotions to Off. Google may ask for a reason. There is no campaign-level version of this switch described anywhere in Google’s documentation. If you have one account covering stores in several regions, it is all or nothing.
The second lever is quieter and, for most advertisers, better. Automated promotions skips any campaign that already has a manual promotion running. So if you attach your own promotion asset, with your own wording, dates, promo code and minimum spend, the campaign is out of scope. You keep the format and you keep the pen. Google’s promotion asset setup even includes seasonal occasions: Halloween runs October 1 to November 15, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday open on October 15. You were going to build those anyway.
Which lever to pull depends on the business. If your offers are simple, current and open to everyone, keeping the feature on and checking it weekly may be fine. If you sell under minimum advertised price agreements, run regulated offers in finance or healthcare, or let individual locations post their own deals, switch it off or fill every eligible campaign with manual promotions before Monday.
What to do this week
Start with a list. For every Google Ads account you run, find the active Search and Performance Max campaigns that have location assets and no manual promotion attached. Those are the campaigns Google can write offers into from Monday.
Check whether it is already on. Look at the Automated promotions setting in Advanced settings, then filter Assets by asset type Promotion and look for Google AI in the Added by column. If anything is there, hover over it and see what Google picked up and from where.
Read your site as Google will. Open every final URL those campaigns use, on mobile and desktop, and write down every offer you can see: banners, sticky bars, pop-ups, product badges, footer text. Next to each one, write its real end date and its real conditions. Anything you cannot date, delete or rewrite so the condition sits next to the offer.
Make one person the owner of site offers. Put the website promo calendar under the same sign-off as ad copy, so a merchandiser who posts a banner knows it can run in paid search within a day. Because Google re-checks offers on a rolling basis of under 24 hours, build the habit of pulling a banner the day before an offer ends, not the morning after.
Decide on purpose and write it down. On, off, or manual promotions per account, with the reason. If you are leaving it on, annotate October 12 in your reporting so a Q4 shift has a date next to it.
Ask your Google rep three questions in writing: which of your accounts and markets are enrolled, what “other sources” means on the account-level page, and how a disputed or expired offer gets pulled before it serves again.
Google is not wrong that a real offer can make an ad more useful. The problem is the part between the offer and the ad. For years that part was a person in your ad account. From Monday it can be a page on your site and whatever happens to still be on it. Decide who owns that page before the banner gets its budget.
