Google sent advertisers an email earlier this month that most owners never read. Since October 12, Google Ads has been scanning advertiser websites for discounts and deals, turning what it finds into promotion assets, and attaching them to ads. Automatically. You do not approve them first.
Here is how it works, per Google's own wording: the system will "automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions" from your site. It applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns that have location assets linked and no promotion assets already attached. Campaigns where you manage your own promotions get skipped.
And here is the detail that should make you sit up: the promotions show up in your account's Assets section only after they have already served. There is no preview queue. The first time you can see what Google pulled is after your customers have. Which means that if your campaigns were eligible, this has potentially been running in your account for two weeks and the only record of it is retrospective.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong
Think about what is actually on your website right now. The $99 tune-up special from two springs ago that nobody ever took down. The seasonal sale page that is technically still live because the web company never archives anything. The new-customer discount that was supposed to be for one zip code.
Google says sourced promotions get re-verified within 24 hours, but nothing published so far explains how the system recognizes that an offer is expired, conditional, or regional. And a discount in an ad is not decoration, it is a representation. If your ad says $99 and your office says that ended in 2024, you are the one having that conversation with the customer, not Google.
To be fair, the feature will probably work fine for a lot of accounts. If your site only shows current offers, Google pulling them into your ads is free efficiency. The problem is not the automation. The problem is that it defaults to on, and the record is retrospective.
What to Do Now
First, open your account and look. Assets section, promotion assets. If something is in there you did not create, that is what Google pulled, and it has already served.
Second, audit your own site for offers. Every page. If an offer is dead, take the page down or update it. You should be doing this anyway, because customers find those pages too.
Third, decide who writes your promotions. Campaigns with manual promotion assets are skipped, so the cleanest fix is to own that slot yourself: put your real, current offers in as promotion assets and Google has nothing to fill. An empty asset slot is an invitation.
Fourth, if you want it off entirely, the switch is account level: automated assets settings, Automated Promotions, Off. There is no campaign-level control as of this writing.
The pattern here is one we keep seeing. Google fills whatever you leave empty, on its schedule, with its best guess. It did it with bidding, it did it with ad formats, and now it is doing it with your offers. The accounts that stay clean are the ones where somebody is actually managing the account. If nobody has looked at your assets section since the campaign launched, this is the week.
AdStack™ reviews automated asset settings on every account we run as part of PPC management, because the defaults change more often than most owners hear about. If you are not sure what Google has been writing into your ads this month, book the free audit and we will show you.
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