Starting October 12, 2026, Google Ads will begin finding promotions on your website and adding them to your ads on its own. Without asking you. Without showing you the wording first. Automatically.
The feature is called Automated Promotions. Google has already documented it in its official help center and emailed advertisers the start date. In plain language: the system scans your site's pages, spots discounts, coupons and special offers, and attaches them as promotion assets to your Search and Performance Max ads.
Google's own help page gives a simple example: if a product page mentions a discount on a specific item, the system pulls that number out and displays it right in the search results, next to your ad.
Who is affected
Not everyone — only accounts where all of these are true at once:
- active Search or Performance Max campaigns are running;
- location assets — your business addresses — are attached to those campaigns;
- the campaigns have no manually added promotion assets.
If you already run your own manual promotions, the automation skips your campaign. If your account has no location assets, it is skipped too. Everyone else is automatically enrolled on October 12: the feature works on an opt-out basis, meaning it is on by default and you have to switch it off yourself.
Where the risk is
Google promises to show only live offers: each sourced promotion serves for less than 24 hours, after which the system re-checks whether it is still visible on your site.
But the source of truth here is your own website. And honestly — what is hanging on yours? An old "sale ends this month" banner that ended last month. A landing page from last year's sale that nobody took down. A partner coupon that was never meant for the whole internet to see.
From October 12, any of that can end up inside your advertising. A customer sees the discount in your ad, shows up on your site or in your store asking for it — and the discount does not exist. You will be the one explaining, not Google.
One more nuance: in the Assets section these promotions are labeled as created by Google AI. And you can only see the ones that have already served. So the picture in your account is retrospective — based on impressions that already happened, not offered for approval in advance.
What to do: a 2-minute check
Before Monday, walk through three steps.
Step 1. Clean up your website. Open the pages your ads point to. Remove expired promotions, dead coupons and banners from finished sales. Keep only what is genuinely active and what you are happy for all of search to see.
Step 2. Open the setting in Google Ads. Go to Campaigns → Assets. In the filter bar, click the "More" (three-dot) icon and choose "Account level automated assets".
Step 3. Make the decision yourself. On that page, click the three-dot icon again → "Advanced settings" → the "Automated Promotions" drop-down. Leave it "On" if you want Google to add your offers for you. Choose "Off" if you prefer to control promotions manually — the system may ask for a reason.
That is it. Either you control which discounts your customers see — or, from October 12, an algorithm does it for you, using data from your own website.
Sources
- Official Google Ads Help, "About Automated promotions": https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/18057626?hl=en
- Google's email to advertisers (October 12 auto-enrollment date), published by Search Engine Roundtable, October 5, 2026: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-automated-promotions-october-12-42223.html
- PPC Land's breakdown of how Google will pull website coupons into campaigns: https://ppc.land/google-ads-will-auto-apply-website-coupons-to-some-campaigns-from-october-12/
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