What changed on October 12
Google emailed some advertisers about a feature called automated promotions. According to Search Engine Roundtable, which published the email, it says:
"Starting October 12, 2026, Google Ads will automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions, such as coupons and deals, from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns."
It's on unless you turn it off. Google's own Help article on automated promotions sets out who's in scope. Campaigns need to be:
- "Active Search or Performance Max campaigns with attached Location Assets (including Local Ad campaigns)."
- Running with "No existing manual promotions currently running on the campaign."
So this isn't a new feature you can ignore until you choose it. It's a default that changed under you.
Who should look first
Multi-location brands. Location assets are what put a campaign in scope, and they're most common where there are many locations, restaurants above all.
Google says its checks ensure "only active, non-expired offers are shown", and that each automated promotion runs for less than 24 hours before it's re-checked against your site. The catch is in what counts as active: anything still visible on your website. These are illustrative cases, not things we've measured:
- A deal that only runs at some locations, written on a page that doesn't say so clearly.
- An old landing page for a past campaign that's still live and still crawlable.
- A coupon in a page banner nobody remembers adding.
Google's advice is plain: "Make sure to keep your website's promotional details up to date".
Check the account
Google's Help article gives the path. Labels move around, so match it to what's on your screen:
- Go to Assets in the Campaigns menu.
- From the filter bar, open the "More" (three-dot) menu and choose Account level automated assets.
- On that page, open the three-dot menu again and choose Advanced settings.
- Find Automated promotions and see whether it's on.
To see what Google has already added, go back to Assets, filter by asset type Promotion, and look at the "Added by" column. Google's own additions are labeled Google AI, and hovering over the label shows where the offer was sourced.
Check the site
Search your own site for promo, coupon, deal and offer pages. A Google search such as site:yourdomain.com coupon is a quick start, and your CMS's page list is a better one.
For each page, ask whether you'd be happy to see that offer in an ad today, in every market where your ads run. Anything that fails is a candidate for what Google finds.
Decide on purpose
There are two sensible outcomes:
- Leave it on, after the site check, if every offer on your site is one you'd advertise everywhere.
- Turn it off and run your own promotion assets, if you need control over wording, dates or locations. In Google's words, you can "manually upload specific promotions if you need to control the exact promotional content (for example, start and end dates)."
To opt out, the Help article uses the same Advanced settings menu: set Automated promotions to Off, and give a reason if asked. Running your own promotion asset on a campaign also takes it out of scope.
The measurement angle
An automated promotion changes what your ad says. If conversion rate moves on a location-linked campaign after October 12, rule this out before anyone credits a bid change or a new creative.
Google suggests segmenting campaign reports by click type to see how people interact with the offers. That's a good first look. It's the same discipline as any default that changes under you, like the attribution models Google removed this year or the August change to CPA targets. If your Google Ads and GA4 numbers start to drift apart at the same time, Why GA4 and Google Ads Never Match explains where to look.
Review defaults on purpose
Defaults are decisions someone else made for you. This one is reasonable for a site with clean, current offers and a real risk for one without. Check the setting, check the site, and write down what you decided.
Want a second pair of eyes? We review Google Ads conversion setups and account settings like this one. Book a Google Ads settings review.