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Starting October 12, Google Ads will read your website, find your deals and coupons, and put them in your ads for you. No setup. No approval screen. Just Google, rummaging through your pages like a houseguest who opened the fridge without asking.
That sounds handy until you remember what’s actually sitting on most small business websites. Which is why this is less of an ads story and more of a website story.
The short version
Automated promotions are promotion assets Google builds by itself, using deals it finds on your website. According to the advertiser email reported by Search Engine Roundtable, Google will “automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions, such as coupons and deals, from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns.”
It’s aimed at Search and Performance Max campaigns that have location assets linked and don’t already have promotion assets attached. So if you’re a local business running ads with your address hooked up, and you never bothered adding a promotion yourself (no judgment, it’s one more box in an account full of boxes), you’re the target.
And it’s on by default. You don’t opt in. You opt out.
Because Google isn’t writing the offer. You are. Google is just quoting you, and it’s quoting whatever your site says right now, not what you meant to say.
For years the website and the ads lived in separate little worlds. The ads got attention, budgets and someone tweaking them on Tuesdays. The website got updated when somebody’s nephew had a free weekend. Now the ads read the website. The neglected cousin just got promoted to copywriter.
I see this all the time: a homepage banner shouting “Spring Special, 15% Off!” in October. A coupon page with a code that expired before anyone on staff can remember setting it up. A “limited time” offer that has been limited for about three years. Harmless when nobody reads it. A real problem when Google lifts it and shows it to a stranger who’s about to call you.
Picture that phone call. “Your ad says 15% off.” Now you either eat the discount or explain to a brand new customer that your own website lied to them. Neither one is a great first date.
Honestly, I don’t know exactly how picky it’ll be, and neither does anybody outside Google yet. The email says “high-quality promotions,” which suggests it’s trying to grab real, current offers. But “trying to” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Here’s how I’d think about it. Software reading a web page can only judge what’s on the page. If the deal has no end date, sits in big bold text near the top and still has a working “Claim Offer” button, it looks pretty damn current to a machine. The fix isn’t hoping Google is smart. The fix is not leaving stale offers lying around.
That’s the same advice I gave about the little signs that make a site look abandoned. Old promos are the loudest one, because they’re written specifically to grab attention.
Go through your own site like a customer would and write down every offer you find. Every banner, pop-up, coupon page, footer note and “special” on a service page. Then do one of three things with each: update it, put a clear end date on it, or delete it.
A few spots people forget:
Write offers like a grown up: real dates, real terms, one place where they live. “15% off first cleaning, booked by October 31, 2026” is clear to a customer and clear to Google. “SAVE BIG NOW!!!” is clear to nobody. (It also screams 2011, but that’s a separate conversation.)
While you’re in there, check that your prices match what you actually charge. If Google is going to read your site for deals, I’d assume it’s reading the rest of it too.
If your site’s offers are a mess, yes, turn it off until they’re not. If your offers are clean and you’d like more of them in front of people, leaving it on could actually help. It’s a judgment call, not a crisis.
To switch it off, the report says to go to your account-level automated assets settings, find Automated Promotions and set it to “Off.” Takes a minute. Way less time than arguing with a customer about a coupon you forgot existed.
My bigger point: turning it off fixes the ads, but it doesn’t fix the website. Real people still read that expired banner. Google’s ad team just gave you a deadline to clean up something that was already costing you trust. Kind of a favor, in a pain in the ass sort of way.
No, this feature only applies inside Google Ads accounts. But the cleanup still matters, because AI search tools and regular visitors read your offers too, and a stale deal looks careless no matter who finds it.
The feature is described as extracting promotions from your website, not inventing them. The risk is less about made up deals and more about Google finding real ones you forgot to take down.
The rollout is aimed at campaigns that don’t already have promotion assets attached. If you set yours up by hand, you’re in control of the wording, which is honestly the better place to be.
Every year the line between “my website” and “my marketing” gets blurrier. Google’s AI reads it for search answers, chatbots read it before they recommend you, and now Ads reads it for coupons. A website that’s half-assed in one spot shows up half-assed everywhere.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your offers, pages and the rest of the stuff I build and fix, tell me what’s going on over at start a project. I’ll tell you straight what’s worth fixing and what can wait.
