Google Ads Automated Promotions: Your Website Writes Ads

Google should not be writing discount ads from your website without asking you first. Since 12 October, for a large share of small advertisers, that is exactly what it does by default, and most of the owners affected will not hear about it until a customer arrives quoting a deal that ended months ago.

I have no objection to automation. Automation is most of my job; I build hosting platforms. My objection is to a default that turns whatever happens to be sitting on your website into a promise made in your name, inside an ad you are paying for, to a stranger who has never dealt with you.

What Google Actually Switched On

The feature is called automated promotions. Google's own help page on account-level automated assets describes it as "an AI-powered feature that automatically sources, validates, and displays high-quality deals and offers from your website and other sources." Those deals then appear as promotion assets: the extra line under a search ad that reads something like "20% off" or "Buy one get one free".

It arrived quietly. Search Engine Roundtable reported the help document on 7 September, and on 5 October published the email Google had sent to advertisers: "Starting October 12, 2026, Google Ads will automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions" from advertisers' websites. The email adds that it "currently only applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets that don't already have promotion assets attached."

That last condition matters more than it looks.

Location assets are what you get when you link your Google Business Profile to Google Ads, so your address, map pin and distance show beside the ad. Google's own help pages walk local advertisers through exactly that setup. So the businesses most likely to qualify are not national retailers with merchandising teams. They are owner-operators who built a local campaign once, linked their profile because a guide told them to, and have not opened the account settings since.

The off switch exists. Per Google's notice, you open your account-level automated assets settings, find Automated Promotions and select Off. In practice that means Assets, then the Associations tab, then Account level automated assets from the three-dot menu, then Advanced settings. PPC Land's coverage notes that Google names no campaign-level control, so this is one decision for the whole account.

Your Website Is Now the Source of Truth, Whether You Meant It or Not

Consider a scenario I would bet is playing out somewhere this week. A furniture showroom in Longford ran a spring sale in April: 25% off garden furniture, announced with a banner across the top of the homepage. The sale ended. The banner stayed, because changing the homepage meant emailing the designer who built the site, the designer bills by the hour, and it never felt urgent.

It is now October.

Google's crawler reads the homepage, finds a clear, well-formatted discount and judges it a high-quality promotion. Someone searching for garden furniture sees the showroom's ad with "25% off" underneath. They make the drive. At the counter, the owner has two choices: honour a discount they never meant to offer in October, or tell an irritated customer that the ad they paid for was wrong. One costs margin. The other costs a reputation that took years to build, and the customer leaves to tell their friends either way.

Whatever offer sits on your website can now travel into your ads.

Google says it extracts "high-quality" and "valid" promotions. It does not say how it decides what valid means. PPC News Feed, which spotted the feature first, reported on 2 September that each sourced promotion "is eligible for less than 24 hours before it must be re-verified." That sounds reassuring until you ask what it re-verifies against. Your page. If the stale banner is still there tomorrow, the offer is still valid tomorrow. Google has not confirmed the 24-hour detail in its own documentation, so I would not lean on it either way.

Search Engine Roundtable's write-up of the help document quotes Google advising advertisers to keep website promotion details current, or to upload promotions manually where they need exact control. Read that twice. Responsibility for accuracy now sits squarely on your website, and on whoever is able to edit it.

The Legal Exposure Nobody in the Ads World Mentions

Ad industry coverage of this change talks about click-through rates and conversion lift. None of the pieces I read mentioned consumer law, which is odd, because here a discount claim is not just marketing copy.

Section 43 of the Consumer Protection Act 2007 treats a commercial practice as misleading if it is likely to deceive the average consumer about, among other things, the existence of a specific price advantage, and causes them to make a decision they would not otherwise have made. Separately, the 2022 price-reduction regulations (S.I. No. 597 of 2022) require an announced discount to be measured against the lowest price charged in the previous 30 days, a rule the CCPC sets out on its price reductions guidance pages.

The regulator is paying attention. In March 2026 the CCPC published the results of a sweep of 314 online traders across 23 member states plus Iceland and Norway, run with the European Commission during Black Friday sales. Roughly three in ten referenced their discounts incorrectly. That is a European sample during the busiest sales week of the year, not an Irish average, but it tells you where enforcers are looking. Helen Martin of the CCPC said businesses "should know that we are monitoring and have successfully taken traders to court for fake discounts."

I am not a solicitor, and I will not tell you that an expired offer appearing in an automatically generated ad is a breach. That depends on the facts, and you should take proper advice if it ever comes to it. What I will say is this: the business name on the ad is yours, the offer came from your website, and I would not want to be the owner explaining to a regulator that Google wrote it.

When Leaving It On Genuinely Makes Sense

To be fair to Google, the feature is not stupid. For some advertisers it is useful.

If your offer never expires, such as a free first consultation, free local delivery above a set spend, or a standing student rate, automated promotions may simply surface something true that you never got round to adding as an asset. And large retailers with someone whose actual job is updating the website the morning a promotion ends are exactly who this was designed for. For a business with daily merchandising discipline, the default probably saves a step and costs nothing.

Most local businesses are not that. Most have offers that started with good intentions and ended with nobody updating the page.

The Real Problem Is Who Can Edit the Page

This is where I get properly annoyed, and not with Google.

Machines read your website now. Google Ads reads it for promotions. AI search reads it to describe your business, and when your site is wrong or silent, those systems fill the gap with whatever else they can find, which is the problem behind AI having the wrong information about your business. Every one of those systems assumes your website is current. Your site has stopped being a brochure. It is a data feed, and a stale feed produces stale ads, stale answers and annoyed customers.

The old agency model is built for exactly the opposite. A site costing €3,000 to €5,000, delivered once, with every later change routed through a change request at somewhere between €75 and €150 an hour. Under that arrangement a dead banner stays up for six months because removing it costs money and nobody remembers to ask. It was a poor deal when the only reader was a human. With an ad system reading the same page and spending your budget on what it finds, it becomes an expensive one.

The fix is not complicated. The person who knows the sale has ended should be the person who takes the banner down, in two minutes, without emailing anyone. That is the whole case for owners building and running their own WordPress sites, which already power roughly four in ten of all websites according to W3Techs, and it is why being able to describe your business and have AI build the site in under a minute matters more than it did a year ago. On Web60 the owner has full WordPress access from day one, for €60 a year with hosting, SSL and backups included, so editing an offer page takes as long as it takes you to type. If you want the wider picture of how AI is changing what a small business website has to do, we set it out in what AI-powered WordPress means for business owners.

What to Check Before Your Next Ad Runs

Decide deliberately. If you run Search or Performance Max campaigns with your Business Profile linked, open the account-level automated assets settings and choose on or off on purpose, rather than inheriting Google's choice.
Audit every offer on your site. Homepage banners, pop-ups, footer strips, blog posts announcing a sale, landing pages from last year's campaign. If Google's crawler can reach it, assume it can be read as a promotion.
Put end dates on the page. "25% off garden furniture until 30 April" is far harder for any system to misread than "25% off garden furniture".
Verify what actually served. Google's documentation notes that assets with zero impressions will not appear in reporting, so the Assets section shows you only what customers have already seen. Look weekly while a campaign is running.

One honest limitation. Switching automated promotions off in Google Ads only stops Google Ads. It does nothing about AI search tools, comparison sites or voucher aggregators reading the same stale banner. And because the control is account-wide, you cannot keep it for an evergreen campaign and block it for a seasonal one. The only fix that covers every reader at once is taking the expired offer off the page.

Where This Leaves You

Google flipping a default is not a scandal. Vendors do it constantly, and I stopped being surprised years ago. What changed on 12 October is quieter and more important: the offers on your website are now inputs to systems you do not control, and those systems treat them as current until your page says otherwise.

That turns the ability to edit your own site in minutes from a convenience into a commercial necessity. Check the account setting, clear out the dead offers, and decide for yourself what your website should be promising on your behalf.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Google Ads automated promotions?

Automated promotions are an account-level automated asset in Google Ads. Google's help documentation describes them as an AI-powered feature that sources, validates and displays deals and offers from your website and other sources, then shows them as a promotion line under your Search or Performance Max ads. From 12 October 2026 the feature is switched on by default for eligible campaigns.

How do I turn off automated promotions in Google Ads?

In your Google Ads account, open Assets, go to the Associations tab, use the three-dot menu to choose Account level automated assets, then open Advanced settings. Find Automated Promotions, select Off, pick a reason and save. The setting applies to the whole account, and trade coverage reports no campaign-by-campaign control.

Which campaigns are affected by automated promotions?

According to the notice Google sent advertisers, the feature currently only applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets that do not already have promotion assets attached. Location assets usually come from linking your Google Business Profile to Google Ads, which is why local businesses are the most likely to qualify. Google says currently, so the scope may widen.

Do I have to honour a discount Google showed in my ad?

There is no simple yes or no. Under the Consumer Protection Act 2007, a practice that misleads the average consumer about a price advantage can be treated as misleading, and the ad carries your business name. Whether an expired offer shown by an automated system creates an obligation depends on the facts, so take advice from a solicitor if it happens, and in the meantime remove expired offers from your website so the situation does not arise.

How do I stop old offers on my website being picked up by Google Ads?

Remove expired offers from every page Google can crawl, including homepage banners, pop-ups, footer strips and old landing pages, and put end dates on any offer that stays up. If you want promotions in your ads, add them yourself as promotion assets with start and end dates, because Google says campaigns that already have promotion assets attached are not eligible for automated ones.

Google Ads Automated Promotions Turn Your Old Website Offers Into Live Ads