Enterprise

Google Ads turns on automated promotions tomorrow — here's the opt-out path

Starting October 12, Google will auto-extract coupons from advertisers' websites and attach them to eligible Search and Performance Max campaigns. Enrollment is default-on.

By Asher Glick· Enterprise software desk·2026-10-11·3 min read

Starting tomorrow, October 12, Google Ads will begin scraping promotional offers off advertisers’ own websites and attaching them as paid-ad assets inside Search and Performance Max campaigns, with enrollment switched on by default. The feature targets campaigns that already have linked location assets and no manually added promotion assets. Google’s email to advertisers said its systems would identify and extract “high-quality promotions such as coupons and deals.”

The notice itself has a story. Search Engine Roundtable published the email text on October 5 after Arpan Banerjee forwarded it via LinkedIn, and it reached only “some advertisers.” That gave the public roughly seven days of warning, which, by the time this piece lands, is one business day.

Google’s help article specifies that each automated promotion is eligible to serve for less than 24 hours, and can be re-enabled only as long as Google’s systems can keep verifying the promotion is still visibly available on the website. In practice, the owner’s live site is the source of truth, and the live site is the surface being read. PPC.land flagged the obvious hazard: an advertisement carrying a specific discount claim is a legal representation as well as a marketing one, and a stale coupon page or a conditional offer scraped out of context becomes a paid claim nobody wrote.

Reporting is retrospective. Assets that pulled zero impressions won’t appear in the Assets section, so the account record shows only what has already served. Owners find out about the auto-written ad after it has run.

The opt-out exists but is deliberately coarse. Account-level automated assets settings, Automated promotions, Off. There’s no campaign-level toggle. Manually attaching a promotion asset to a campaign exempts that campaign and converts the question from “what did Google surface?” to “what did I approve?”

This fits the 2026 Google Ads default-on automation pattern that already produced the AI Max auto-upgrade, and it arrives the same week Meta pointed its own small-business ad tooling at 200 million SMBs. The platforms are no longer asking owner-operators what to run. They’re reading the website and running it.

Sources