Somewhere on your website there is probably a deal. A banner across the top of the homepage. A "15% off your first visit" box on a service page. A coupon you added for the spring rush and never took down.
Until last week, that deal lived on your website and nowhere else. As of October 12, Google Ads can lift it off the page and show it under your ads, as a promotion, to everyone searching for what you sell. Eligible accounts did not have to agree to this. They were switched on, and the setting to turn it off sits behind two three-dot menus.
This is not a disaster, and for some businesses it will genuinely help. But it changes what your website is. Every offer on it is now a candidate for ad copy, and Google decides which one runs, who sees it, and how much of the fine print survives the trip. That is worth ten minutes of your attention this week.
Google Started Reading Your Website for Deals on October 12
The feature is called automated promotions. Google's help page describes it in one sentence: "Google automatically identifies and extracts promotional offers directly from your website." It then turns those offers into promotion assets, the small add-on that appears beneath a search ad with a bold label and a line or two about the deal.
Promotion assets themselves are not new. You have always been able to write one by hand: pick an occasion, enter a percent or dollar discount, name the item, add a promo code or a minimum spend if there is one. What is new is that Google now writes them for you, from your own pages, without asking first.
Advertisers heard about it the way they hear about most of these changes, through an email to some accounts that Search Engine Roundtable reported. The email said that starting October 12, 2026, Google Ads would "automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions, such as coupons and deals, from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns." There was no blog post, no published rollout schedule and no list of which countries or accounts are included. If you did not get the email, that does not mean you are not affected. It may only mean you have not been reached yet.
Automated Promotions Only Run Where You've Linked a Business Location
Google lists three conditions for a campaign to qualify:
- It is a Search or Performance Max campaign.
- It has location assets attached, meaning your Google Business Profile address is linked to the account.
- It does not already have a promotion asset of your own running.
The second condition is the one that tells you who this is really for. Location assets are what put your address, your distance and your map pin on an ad. Online-only stores rarely use them. A dentist, an HVAC company, a gym, a dance studio, an auto repair shop, a chiropractor almost always do, because "near me" is how their customers search. So while the feature is technically open to any advertiser, in practice it lands on local businesses first.
The third condition matters just as much, and we will come back to it, because it is also the cleanest way to stay in control.
Google Can't Read Your Expiration Date Yet. It Checks Whether the Banner Is Still Up.
The most important line on Google's help page is easy to read past. "Each automated promotion is eligible to serve for a limited time (less than 24 hours)." Google adds that this "is expected to change in the future when Google can extract promotion start and end dates."
Read that the other way around. Today, Google cannot reliably tell when your offer starts or ends. So instead of trusting a date, it shows the promotion for less than a day, then checks your site again. If the offer is still visible, it can run again. Google calls this verification, and says it "ensures that only active, non-expired offers are shown."
That protects you from one problem and hands you another. If you take a deal down, it should drop out of your ads within about a day, although an independent write-up of the feature noted that nothing guarantees an offer disappears from an ad the instant it leaves the page. The bigger risk runs in the opposite direction. To Google, any deal still on your website is a live deal. Google is not checking whether you still honor it. It is checking whether it can still see it.
Most small business websites are full of offers like that:
- The seasonal banner nobody removed after the season ended.
- The coupon in the footer that a web designer added two years ago.
- A promotion landing page from last spring that is still published, just not linked from the menu.
- A blog post announcing a grand-opening special.
- A pop-up offering a discount for joining the email list.
Google does not say exactly which parts of a page it reads, so we cannot tell you which of these it will find. That is the point. You cannot rule any of them out, and the only way to make sure Google doesn't promote an expired offer is to make sure the offer no longer exists on the site.
A Veterans' Discount on Your Website Becomes an Ad Every Searcher Sees
Most real offers come with conditions, and the conditions are usually what make them affordable. "10% off for veterans and first responders." "$50 off your first service, first-time customers only." "Free exam with any new patient visit, Elm Street office only." "15% off when you join our list." Each was written for one kind of customer, and the fine print sat right next to it on the page.
A promotion asset has very little room. Google's help page describes it as a bold occasion label with "up to 2 lines of text" about the deal. The asset has fields for the discount, the item, a promo code or a minimum order, and the dates. It has no field for "first-time customers only," "one location," or "cannot be combined with insurance." When Google builds the asset for you, it decides what to keep, and Google has not published how it handles the conditions. The discount is the part it is looking for. The conditions have nowhere to go.
So the veterans' discount becomes "10% off" shown to everyone searching for you. The new-customer offer becomes "$50 off" shown to your existing customers too. The one-location special shows up beside an ad that sends people to your other office.
Then the phone rings. A customer says they saw $50 off on Google. Whoever answers can honor a discount that caller was never meant to get, or spend the first minute with a new customer correcting your ad. Neither one is the receptionist's fault, and neither one shows up anywhere in your Google Ads reports. It shows up in your margin and in how that first conversation goes.
If you have already worked through the broader version of this problem, the AI-written prices and claims that drift into ads, we covered it in The AI Copy on Your Website Feeds Your Google Ads. Google Now Says a Human Has to Check It. Automated promotions are the same lesson in its most expensive form, because the claim Google is pulling is a discount.
A 15% Coupon in Your Ad Also Goes to People Who Were Already Calling
There is a second cost, and it is quieter. A deal on your website mostly reaches people who are already shopping around. A deal in your ad reaches everyone who sees the ad, including people who had already decided to call you.
Think about who searches your business name, or "brake repair near me" when your shop is the one they used last year. Many of those people were going to book at full price. Put "15% off" under the ad and you have just given a discount to customers you already had.
Here is a simple illustration, with made-up but realistic numbers. An auto repair shop does a $400 brake job and keeps about $160 of it after parts and labor. A 15% coupon takes $60 off the price, and all $60 comes out of that $160. If the coupon brings in a customer who would otherwise have gone elsewhere, that can be a good trade. If it lands on someone who was booking anyway, the shop just gave away more than a third of the profit on that job for nothing.
You decide the size of a discount by thinking about who it is for. Automated promotions take that decision away from you. Google's goal is a more clickable ad. Yours is a profitable job, and those two only overlap when the right people are seeing the offer.
We Checked 11 Accounts That Qualify. Google Hasn't Added a Promotion to Any of Them Yet.
We wanted to know how far this has actually spread, so on October 19, one week after the start date, we pulled the data from every account we manage that ran Search or Performance Max ads in the past week. That came to 20 accounts, a mix of local service businesses, online stores and B2B companies. Fourteen had a business location linked, and three of those already ran a promotion of their own. That left 11 that met all of Google's conditions on paper.
In those 11 accounts, Google had not created a single promotion, and not one promotion had shown under an ad from October 12 on.
That is not because the report misses things Google adds. The same pull shows more than 1,400 assets Google has created on its own in those 11 accounts over time: sitelinks, headlines, images, even videos. A promotion an advertiser wrote by hand also turned up, with its impressions, in one of the accounts that did not qualify. So the report can see promotions, and it can see what Google makes. In these accounts, it just hasn't made any promotions yet.
The likeliest explanation is that the rollout is gradual, which fits an email that went to some advertisers and a feature with no public schedule. It is also possible Google simply found nothing on these sites it was willing to call a promotion. From the outside we cannot tell which, and neither should reassure you about your own account. One week is not a trend, and a feature that is switched on and waiting is still switched on.
Five Minutes in Your Assets Report Shows What Google Added
You can check your own account in less time than it took to read this far.
See whether Google has created anything. In Google Ads, open Assets from the left-hand menu. Filter the asset type to Promotion. Look at the column labeled Added by. Every asset Google made will say "Google AI." Anything you made will show your account or your name. Hover over "Google AI" and Google shows where it sourced the promotion, which tells you which page of your site to fix.
Find the switch. From Assets, click the three-dot More icon in the filter bar and choose Account level automated assets. On that page, open the three-dot menu again and select Advanced settings. Automated promotions has its own dropdown there. The options are "On (recommended)" and "Off," and eligible accounts start on. This is the same area that controls the other assets Google generates for you, which is worth a look while you are there. We have written before about why Google's defaults tend to serve Google first, in A 100% Optimization Score Just Means You Agreed With Google.
Read your own website like Google would. Open the pages your ads send people to, and the homepage, and search each one for a percent sign, a dollar sign followed by "off," and the words "coupon," "special," "deal" and "promo." Anything you find there is something Google can find. If it is out of date, take it down. If it has conditions, make sure you would be comfortable seeing it without them.
If you would rather not do this yourself, it is one of the first things we check when we take over an account. But it is genuinely a five-minute job, and nothing about it requires an expert.
A Promotion Asset You Write Yourself Keeps Google From Writing One
Once you know what is on your site, there are three sensible choices, and the right one depends on the offer.
Leave it on if your offers are simple, evergreen and open to everyone. A business whose standing offer is "$25 off any service, every day, no conditions" loses very little if Google shows it, and may get a few more clicks from it.
Turn it off if your offers are short-lived, limited to certain customers or locations, or in a regulated field where the wording of an offer matters. Healthcare, legal, financial and home-improvement financing offers all fall here. One dropdown at the account level does it.
Write the promotion yourself if you have one offer you actually want people to see. This is the option most owners never consider, and it is the best of the three. Google's own help page points the same way: "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." Remember Google's third condition: automated promotions only run where there is no promotion of your own. A promotion asset you write keeps Google from writing one, and you choose the occasion, the exact discount, the promo code, the minimum order and the dates it is allowed to run. Promotion assets can be added at the account, campaign or ad group level, and Google uses the most specific one, so you can even give each service its own offer.
There is no extra charge either way. Promotion assets are free to add, and a click on one costs the same as a click on the headline. The difference is who wrote the words.
Whichever you choose, check back in a month. Google suggests segmenting your campaign reports by click type to see how people interact with your offers, and that is the honest test: whether clicks on the promotion turn into the jobs you want at a price you can live with, not whether the promotion got clicked.
Google Reads the Banner on Your Homepage as Ad Copy Now
This is the second time in two months that Google has switched something on in small business accounts and left owners to find out. In September it was AI Max, which we walked through in Google Switched Your Search Campaign to AI Max on September 1. You Never Said Yes. The pattern is the same each time. Google reads more of your website and writes more of your ads from it, and the default is yes.
That doesn't make your website something to fear. It makes it something to maintain. A banner used to be decoration. Now it can be a line in your ads, shown to people deciding whether to call you. Take down the deals you no longer honor, keep the conditions next to the ones you do, and if there is one offer you want people to see, write it yourself so Google doesn't write it for you.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on what Google has already switched on in your account, that is exactly the kind of review we do every day in our Google Ads management work. And if you'd rather handle it yourself, you now know exactly where to look.
