Google Ads Will Now Scrape Discounts Off Your Landing Page and Run Them as Ads
Google Ads added a new account-level automated asset called Automated promotions, reported by Search Engine Roundtable on September 7, 2026. Google now extracts offer copy such as "20% off" directly from your landing pages and serves it in Search and Performance Max ads on any campaign with location assets and no manual promotion. It is on by default. The opt-out sits four clicks deep in account-level automated asset settings.
Hana Kobzová of PPC News Feed spotted it first. I read the help doc twice to make sure I had the direction right. I did. This is opt-out, not opt-in, and the eligibility rules are written so that the accounts most likely to get caught are the ones with the least PPC attention: local retailers, franchise location pages, multi-location service businesses. Anyone with location assets attached and nobody uploading promotion assets by hand.
The default setting is the whole story
According to Google's help page for Automated promotions, three things make a campaign eligible. It has to be an active Search or Performance Max campaign. It needs Location Assets attached. And it cannot have manual promotions currently running. Meet all three and Google "automatically identifies and extracts promotional offers directly from your website" and shows them in your ads.
Think about who that describes. A big ecommerce brand with a promo calendar and a paid search team already runs manual promotion assets on everything, so the automation never fires. The dentist with six offices, the regional furniture chain, the franchisee who set up location assets in 2023 because a Google rep told them to: those are the accounts that qualify. Which is a bit like hiring a sign-spinner who reads whatever is taped to your shop window and shouts it at traffic, including the poster from last spring nobody took down.
On paper, that sounds like free conversion lift. And sometimes it will be. A store that actually has 20% off sweaters this week gets that line in its ad without anyone lifting a finger. The problem is everything else that looks like an offer to a crawler.
Google's own doc tells you where the risk is
The help page includes a line I would frame: "Each automated promotion is eligible to serve for a limited time (less than 24 hours)." After it expires, the promotion can be re-enabled if Google can verify it is still visible on your site. So there is a safety valve. It just checks the wrong thing.
A visibility check is not a validity check.
A "Save 20% this weekend" banner that is still live on your page on Wednesday will pass a visibility check on Wednesday, and Thursday, and every day until someone in marketing remembers it exists. From what I can tell, the doc does not spell out what counts as an offer either, so I would assume anything that reads like a discount, a bundle, or a free-shipping threshold is fair game. Google's stated advice is to "keep your website's promotional details up to date, or manually upload specific promotions if you require exact control over what is shown." Translated: the fix for our automation reading your stale copy is for you to have no stale copy.
Anyway. That sentence would be a mild annoyance if it were not for what changed in the terms two months ago.
The July terms update made stale offers your liability
Diana Talhelm at ZATO PPC Marketing wrote a useful breakdown of the Google Ads Terms of Service update that took effect July 1, 2026. Two changes matter here. The terms now explicitly cover website content accessed through Google's crawling, and they put the advertiser on the hook for reviewing, approving, or removing auto-generated assets. Her line for it: the machine "is not going to be in the client call when something goes sideways."
Pair that with Google's Dishonest pricing practices policy, which lists bait-and-switch as "deceptively advertising a product or service at an enticing, often unrealistic, low price to lure customers." The policy does give a warning at least 7 days before any suspension, so I am not predicting mass account bans over a forgotten BOGO. I think that is unlikely. The realistic cost is smaller and more annoying: a customer walks in holding a phone with your ad on it, the discount is not real, and the store honors it anyway because the alternative is a one-star review. Multiply by however many locations you run.
And to be fair, this is not a brand-new category of problem. Google Ads has been writing copy from landing pages since dynamic search ads. What seems different now is that a promotion is a promise with a price on it, and the terms have caught up to say the promise is yours.
Agencies have already paid for this lesson once
In October 2022, when automatically created assets rolled out, advertisers asked Google for a mass opt-out and did not get one. Brad Geddes told Search Engine Roundtable at the time that "the agencies we work with have spent over 1000 hours manually tracking & turning off DDA where it was not appropriate." Google's Ads Liaison forwarded the feedback. Four years later the account-level automated assets page lists nine separate automated asset types, and Automated promotions is the newest one on it. Each is its own toggle, per account.
Some of those toggles I would leave on. Dynamic sitelinks mostly help. Seller ratings are fine. Automated location assets are the reason half these accounts qualify in the first place, which is a little ironic. Promotions are the one where a wrong output has a dollar figure attached, so I treat it differently.
Also, and this tripped up at least one writeup I read: Adriaan Dekker notes this is separate from the Automated promotions feature in Merchant Center. If you turned that one off last year, you have not turned this one off. Different product, same name. Very Google.
Ten minutes to figure out which bucket you are in
There are really only three situations, and each has a different move.
You already run manual promotion assets everywhere. The automation is blocked on any campaign that has one, so your job is finding the gaps. In Google Ads, go to Assets, filter by Promotion, and compare that campaign list against every Search and PMax campaign carrying location assets. Any campaign in the second list and not the first is exposed. Benchmark: zero gaps. If you find even one, that campaign is live with whatever Google scraped.
You have no manual promotions and your pages carry offer language. Turn it off this week, then decide at leisure whether you want it back. The path from the help doc: Campaigns menu, Assets, the three-dot icon, Account level automated assets, three-dot icon again, Advanced settings, then set the Automated promotions dropdown to Off. Then do the page audit anyway, because the July terms cover crawled content regardless. Site-search your final URLs for "% off", "BOGO", "free shipping", "sale ends", and "limited time." Anything with no end date or an end date older than 30 days gets fixed or removed. From what I have seen of local retail sites, expect to find at least one per location page.
You actually want this. A local retailer whose website promotions are genuinely kept current could reasonably leave it on. Fine. But someone has to own a weekly check: pull the automated promotions in the Associations view, compare against the current promo calendar, and kill anything not on it the same day. If you cannot name the person doing that check, you are in bucket two.
This is the same pattern as the August 17 bidding change: a default flips, the changelog readers adjust, and everyone else finds out from a client. Personally, I would put this on the same audit list.
Where I think this lands by December
My guess is that within 90 days we see the first screenshot thread of an automated promotion advertising a discount a store stopped honoring, and I would put it at better than even odds the page involved is a franchise location page that head office does not control. That is the structural weak spot here. The ads are run centrally, the pages are edited locally, and the automation reads the pages.
I do not think Google is being malicious about this. Plenty of local advertisers really never upload promotions and probably do have valid offers sitting on their sites, and for them this is a small free win. But the accounts that benefit are the ones where somebody keeps the website honest, and that is rarely the same person who runs the ads. If those two people have not talked this week, that is probably the first meeting to book.
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