A Google Ads account doesn’t run only on what you or your contractor set up. Some features the system turns on by itself, or they switch on together with a campaign. That is not always bad. But you are the one paying for the ads, so it is worth knowing what is running without your say-so.
Below are five such settings. For each one: what it is in plain words, how it can affect your money, what to ask whoever runs your ads, and where to find it in the account. Menu names are taken from Google’s English help pages; depending on the interface version, they may differ slightly. We checked some of the claims against Google’s help pages on October 5, 2026, and where that is the case, the link is in the text.
1. Your ads are shown beyond your city
What it is. In the location settings, the default option is “Presence or interest”. Google’s help page describes it as the default and recommended setting. Your ad is shown both to people who are in your city and to people who have merely shown “interest” in it: searched for it, read about it, looked at it on a map. Such a person may be in another state or country.
How it affects your money. For a store that ships across the whole country, this may be fine. For an auto repair shop or a salon, a click from someone in another city is money spent with no chance of winning a customer. Our rule for local campaigns is different: we choose “Presence”, which means only people who are in that place or regularly visit it. For one cleaning company (Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa), turning off “interest” in search brought in more targeted traffic.
Ask your contractor: are we set to “Presence” or “Presence or interest”?
Where to look. Campaigns → Campaigns → Settings tab → your campaign → Locations panel → advanced location options. Choose “Presence” (in the help page: “Reach people in or regularly in your targeted locations”).
2. Google adds things to your ads
What it is. These are “account-level automated assets”. Google adds dynamic sitelinks, structured snippets and images from your site, an address, a seller rating, and also photos from your business profile on Maps to your ad on its own.
How it affects money. Some of it helps, and some spoils the look of the ad: the image may turn out to be an old banner from one of your pages or a random photo a visitor added to your profile. You get no notifications about new automated assets, so they are easy to miss. After Google’s 2024 ad update, the links and callouts you add manually don’t always push out the automated ones: both can be shown together.
Ask your contractor: which automated assets do we have turned on, and who has reviewed them?
Where to look. Campaigns → Assets → Associations tab → three-dot menu on the right → “Account level automated assets” → the same menu → “Advanced settings”. There you can turn off individual types. Separately, for photos from your profile: Tools → Shared library → Location manager → Settings. There are two checkboxes: “Google Business Profile merchant photos” and “Google-owned rich media”. According to industry sources, these permissions are recent and on some accounts are turned on without your decision, so check both.
3. In automated campaigns, Google picks the page on your site
What it is. Automated campaigns (Performance Max, where ads are shown across all Google channels at once) have a setting called “Final URL expansion”. It lets Google send a person not to the page you specified but to another page on your site. According to Google’s help page, it is on by default in these campaigns.
How it affects money. Someone clicks an ad for a product and lands on “Delivery” or “Contact us”. In one real example, an iPhone ad ended up on a MacBook page. You pay for the click, and the sale doesn’t happen.
Both sides, honestly. Google has stated that, on average, this expansion brings about 9% more conversions (2023 data, testing period). For a store with thousands of products, where you can’t write an ad for every page, practitioners advise leaving it on but with a list of excluded pages: technical sections, the privacy policy, related categories. For one specific service or offer, it is better to turn it off. Our approach: don’t leave it to chance.
Ask your contractor: is Final URL expansion turned off? If not, which pages are excluded?
Where to look. Campaigns → Campaigns → gear icon next to the campaign → “Campaign settings” → “Asset optimization” → “Text” section → “Final URL” checkbox. You add excluded pages in the same place, under “Exclude some URLs”. This is a campaign setting, not an asset group setting.
4. Google writes ad copy and builds videos by itself
What it is. In the same automated campaigns, Google writes headlines based on your site’s text, “enhances” the look of your photos (crops them, overlays text and a logo), and can build a video from your images. Search campaigns have a separate switch for headlines and descriptions that Google writes on its own.
How it affects money. Text and images go live without your review: an outdated discount from a page, a typo, the wrong tone. This matters most where wording carries legal weight, such as healthcare or finance. The quality of automated text also depends on your site: if a page has little content or loads slowly, the result will be worse. In that case the problem is not the campaign but the site.
Ask your contractor: who checks this text and these images before they go live?
Where to look. Performance Max campaign → “Campaign settings” → “Asset optimization”: in the “Text” section, “Text customization” (this feature used to be called “automatically created assets”); in the “Images” and “Video” tiles, the “Enhancement” checkboxes. Google builds videos from your images and text separately, and only when your asset groups have no videos of your own. For a Search campaign: Campaigns → Settings tab → the campaign → “AI Max” → “Asset optimization” panel → “Text customization”. According to Google’s help page, from September 2026 campaigns that already use this feature are being upgraded to AI Max automatically.
5. Google applies its own advice by itself
What it is. Your account contains recommendations from Google. As Google’s help page explains, the “Automatically apply recommendations” feature is turned on by a person, not by Google itself. The problem is that this is often done once, and then the checkboxes are forgotten. From then on, Google adds search queries (keywords), turns on broad match, changes bidding targets and removes “unnecessary” negative keywords by itself.
How it affects money. Google states that auto-applying recommendations won’t increase your budget. But it changes where your money goes and at what price, without your approval of each change. In a case described by colleagues, a marketer added a negative keyword and paused some keywords, and the next day auto-apply removed the negative keyword on its own and brought the junk traffic back; the client noticed before the agency did. In one of the accounts we reviewed, all 21 types of recommendations were turned on: every one on the list.
Our rule: bidding recommendations are notifications only, with auto-apply turned off. Practitioners advise turning off at least changes to bidding strategies, budget adjustments, broad match and removal of negative keywords. But turning it off is not enough: we also check the change history.
Ask your contractor: what do we have turned on, and what has Google changed in the last month?
Where to look. Campaigns → Recommendations → “Auto-apply settings”: two bundles, “Maintain your ads” and “Grow your business”, and the “Manage” and “History” tabs. What has already changed shows up on the “History” tab and on the “Change history” page. If you have several accounts, check each one.
This does not mean “turn everything off”
Some of the automation helps: extra links, Final URL expansion for a large store, images that really look good. The problem is not that Google turns something on, but that nobody on the team knows what exactly is on and why.
So five questions remain from the whole text:
- Are we set to “Presence” or “Presence or interest”?
- Which automated assets are on, and who has reviewed them?
- Is Final URL expansion off, and if not, which pages are excluded?
- Who checks the text and images that Google generates?
- Which recommendations are set to auto-apply, and what has Google changed in the last month?
If you don’t feel confident in the account yourself, forward these questions to whoever runs your ads. “I don’t know” is also an answer.
You can read how we set up campaigns in the search advertising and Performance Max sections. For another way to check 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 which of these settings are on and what is worth changing.