Google Ads has added a new account-level automated asset called automated promotions. It scans your landing pages for active offers and attaches what it finds to eligible Search and Performance Max ads. There was no blog post and no email. The feature was spotted by Hana Kobzová on PPC News Feed on 7 September 2026, when a new Google help page appeared, and Search Engine Roundtable covered it the same day.
What Google actually says it does
Google's own help documentation on automated promotions describes it plainly: "Google Ads identifies and sources promotions from your website landing pages, such as 'Buy one get one free'. They are automatically attached to eligible Search and Performance Max campaigns." The example Google gives is a landing page advertising "20% off on black sweaters," which then shows up as a promotion attached to your ad in the search results.
It also now sits in the list of account-level automated assets alongside dynamic sitelinks, dynamic callouts and seller ratings, in Google's reference doc for those assets, described there as "an AI-powered feature that automatically sources, validates, and displays high-quality deals and offers from your website and other sources."
Whether this is switched on for you
Per Google's stated eligibility criteria, three things have to be true:
- You have active Search or Performance Max campaigns with location assets attached, including Local ad campaigns.
- You are not already running manual promotions on that campaign.
- The offer clears standard Google Ads policy.
That location assets condition is the one worth pausing on. Plenty of ecommerce accounts have location assets attached without thinking much about it, often because someone linked a Business Profile years ago to pick up store extensions. If that describes your account, you are in scope whether or not you consider yourself a local advertiser.
One thing we cannot tell you: the reporting gave no rollout schedule and no market list, so we do not know whether accounts in Australia, Sri Lanka or anywhere outside the US are seeing it yet. Nor is there anything published on how the extraction handles non-English landing pages. We are not going to guess. Check your own account rather than assume.
Where this goes wrong
The upside is easy to see. Promotion assets make ads bigger, and bigger ads usually get more clicks. That is not in dispute. The risk sits somewhere else.
Your website is not a clean feed of current offers. Most sites we audit carry at least one promotional line that nobody remembered to remove. A banner from a Black Friday sale that never got taken down. A "free shipping over $50" line on a page where the threshold changed to $75 in March. A percentage in a hero image that expired in June. None of that matters much when a visitor lands on the page and sees the current price. It matters a lot when Google lifts the number out of the page and puts it in your ad.
The person who clicks is expecting the offer. Someone who clicks an ad because it says 20% off has a specific expectation, and it is not going to be met by a page at full price. That is a click you paid for, a conversion rate that drops, and in some markets a consumer law problem rather than just a performance one. Google's own guidance acknowledges the burden lands on you: "make sure to keep your website's promotional details up to date, or manually upload specific promotions if you require exact control over what is shown."
You are paying for the clicks either way. Google's account-level automated assets documentation is clear that there is no charge for the asset showing, but clicks are charged as usual, and Google will bill for up to two clicks per impression across an ad and its assets. A promotion you did not write is not a free addition.
What to do this week
1. Go and look. In Google Ads, open Assets under the Campaigns menu, add a filter for "Added by," and tick "Google AI." That shows you everything Google has created on your behalf, automated promotions included. If something is running that you did not write, you want to know today, not at the end of the month.
2. Audit your landing pages for stale offers. Open every page you are actively sending paid traffic to and read it as if you were Google's extractor rather than a customer. Any percentage, any dollar amount, any bundle wording, any shipping threshold. If it is not currently true, remove it. This is worth doing regardless of what you decide about the feature.
3. If you want control, take it by uploading manual promotions. Eligibility requires no existing manual promotions on the campaign. Running your own promotion assets is therefore the cleanest way to own what appears, and you get the dates and conditions set correctly rather than inferred.
4. If you want it off, turn it off. Google's instructions: Assets, then the Associations tab, then the three-dot menu on the right, then Account level automated assets, then the three-dot menu again, then Advanced settings. Pick the asset to disable, give a reason, and save. It is buried, but it works.
The pattern worth noticing
This is the third default-on change we have written about in six weeks, after the conversion-based customer lists that started processing data in August. The direction is consistent. Google keeps adding things that run unless you find the setting and stop them, and it keeps shipping them through help-page updates rather than announcements. The practical takeaway is not outrage. It is that "we did not change anything" no longer means your account did not change.
If you are not certain what is currently running under Google AI in your account, or whether the offers on your landing pages would survive being read by a machine, that is the sort of thing our free 15-point Profit Audit catches. Thirty minutes, your account, a straight read. No deck, no obligation.