From October 12, Google Adds Your Discounts to Your Ads by Itself

From October 12, 2026, Google Ads will start finding discounts and coupons on your website by itself and showing them in your ads. You do not switch anything on: the feature is already on by default, and only you can turn it off. This can work in your favour. It can also backfire: if an old promotion is forgotten somewhere on your site, people will see it in your ad.

Below: who this affects, how it works, where to turn it off, and what to check on your site in 10 minutes. We checked the facts against the letter Google sent to advertisers (a trade publication published it on 5 October 2026), another publication’s analysis from 6 October, and Google’s help pages. Links to the sources are in the text.

What is changing

In Google’s help, the feature is called “Automated promotions”. It is an AI-powered feature: it finds, validates and shows offers from your website (for example, “20% off black sweaters” or “buy one, get one free”). The promotion appears under your ad as a separate line, just as if you had added it manually. A manual promotion like that is described in Google’s help as a promotion asset: a free add-on to an ad, and you pay only for clicks.

It is one of the “account level automated assets”, the add-ons that Google attaches to your ads on its own. We covered the other settings of this kind in the article What Google Ads Turns On by Itself: 5 Settings and What to Ask Your Contractor.

Who this affects

According to Google’s letter, the feature “currently only applies” to:

• Search campaigns (ads in Google results for what a person types);
• Performance Max campaigns (automated campaigns that show across all Google channels at once);
• that have a business address linked (Google’s help calls these “location assets”);
• and that have no promotions of their own added manually.

Google’s help adds that local ad campaigns are included, and the ads must comply with the standard Google Ads policies. The letter does not say which countries and languages it covers, so we do not claim it is already live in your account. If you have a linked address and no promotions, you most likely fall under the feature. The word “currently” matters too: the range of campaigns may widen over time.

How Google checks that a promotion is current

This is where it gets interesting, because the sources say different things.

What Google says. The help page says advanced verification is meant to ensure that only active, non-expired offers are shown. Each automated promotion is eligible to serve for less than 24 hours. After that it can be re-enabled, but only if Google’s systems keep confirming that it is still visible on your site. The English help page adds one more detail: Google does not yet extract promotion start and end dates, though it says this is expected to change.

What trade publications say. One of them notes that the letter does not explain how Google decides what a “high-quality” promotion is, or what counts as expired. It is also unclear how the system tells apart a discount for one region, or a discount with a condition the buyer has not met.

Put together, the logic is simple: as long as something on a page looks like a current discount, Google may treat it as live, and judging by the help page it does not see the promotion’s start and end dates. This is our conclusion from two sources, not behaviour confirmed by Google.

Who is responsible if a promotion is inaccurate

Google does not say so directly. Neither the letter nor the help page on automated promotions has a separate point on responsibility for a wrong discount. The help only advises keeping the promotion details on your website up to date, and uploading promotions manually if you want full control over what is shown. So we do not claim that the advertiser or Google is responsible. In practice, though, the source of the promotion is your site, and you are the only one who can fix it right away.

How to turn it off

The letter says you can turn it off at any time. You can do it only for the whole account: Google’s help does not describe a separate switch for a single campaign. The path, per Google’s English help:

1. In the Campaigns menu, go to Assets.
2. In the filter bar above the table, click the More (three-dot) icon and choose Account level automated assets.
3. On the page that opens, click the three-dot icon again and choose Advanced settings.
4. In the Automated promotions drop-down, choose Off and, if the system asks, give a reason.

Menu names may differ slightly depending on your interface version.

You can also check what Google has already added there: Assets → filter bar → Asset type → Promotion. Automated ones are labelled “Google AI” in the Added by column. Hover over the label to see the sources.

Turn it off or not

There is no universal answer, and we do not recommend turning it off on principle. Look at your own case.

Keep it on if the promotions on your site are real, the dates and terms on the page are clear, and someone keeps them up to date. Then this free ad add-on works for you: Google says promotions help drive online and offline conversions. It gives no figures for the effect, and neither do we.

Turn it off or take control yourself if your promotions change every week, apply only to some products or cities, have complicated terms, or archive pages are still on your site. An alternative to switching it off is to create your own promotion manually. Google’s help says the automation skips campaigns that already have manual promotions, and manual entry lets you set exact start and end dates. If a promotion is tied to an event (for example, Black Friday), the help says it must be created or edited no more than 6 months before the event begins.

The typical trap: banners and promo codes nobody removed

In our practice, it is usually not the feature that lets people down but the site. The promotion ended, the banner came off the home page, but:

• a category page still says “20% off until 1 September”;
• last year’s promo code sits in the footer or in an old article;
• a pop-up still offers “free delivery over 1000 UAH” although the terms have changed;
• there is a separate “Promotions” page with last year’s list.

For a visitor this is merely sloppy. For an automated feature it is “an offer on the page”. This is our assumption, not a mechanism confirmed by Google, but the risk is obvious and easy to check.

What to check in 10 minutes

1. Open your site in an incognito window and look at the home page, your biggest category pages and the cart. Look for any discounts, promo codes, “until such-and-such date”.
2. Type site:yoursite.com promotion into Google (and again with “discount” and “promo code”). It shows forgotten pages you may not remember.
3. Remove everything expired. Write down what should stay, with the date it is valid until.
4. Open your Google Ads account and see whether there are already automated promotions (path above). If there is an unwanted one, it shows in the list.
5. Decide whether to keep the feature or turn it off. And ask whoever runs your ads: who will check the promotions in the account every week from now on?

Summary

From October 12, Google Ads will start adding discounts from your website to your ads, if you run Search or Performance Max campaigns with a linked address and no promotions of your own. The feature is on by default, and you can turn it off in the account settings. Google says it takes only current offers, but does not explain exactly how it checks, and does not say who is responsible for a mistake. So walk through your site, remove old banners and promo codes, and choose: trust Google with your promotions or run them yourself.

How we set up search advertising and Performance Max is in the sections on search advertising and Performance Max. For checking your contractor, see our article on three checks for Google Ads.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you whether automated promotions apply to you and what to do about it.