Google Ads Will Pull Deals Off Your Website on Oct 12

Starting Monday, October 12, Google Ads will read your website, pick out anything that looks like a coupon or a deal, and attach it to your ads on its own. You do not approve it first. If you run Search or Performance Max campaigns and your business location is linked to the account, you are probably included.

For a retailer with a current sale, that is free help. For a contractor with a “10% off spring bookings” banner nobody took down, it is a problem. Here is what is changing, who should turn it off, and the better option if you do run real offers.

The short version

• From October 12, Google builds “automated promotions” from offers it finds on your site and shows them with your ads.
• It applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns that have location assets (your linked business address) and no promotion you wrote yourself.
• You are opted in by default. The off switch is one account-level setting.
• Anything on your website that reads like an offer is ad copy from now on.

What Google Ads automated promotions actually do

A promotion asset is the extra line under a search ad that says something like “15% off furnace tune-ups.” Until now, you or your ad manager had to write those.

Google’s notice to advertisers says that starting October 12 it “will automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions, such as coupons and deals, from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns” (Search Engine Roundtable). Google’s help page fills in the rest: eligible campaigns are active Search or Performance Max campaigns with location assets attached, and any campaign that already has a manual promotion is skipped (Google Ads Help).

Two mechanics matter:

• Google re-checks the offer daily. Each automated promotion can run for less than 24 hours, then comes back only if Google can still see the offer on your website. So the way to pull an offer out of your ads is to pull it off your site.
• You only see it after it has run. Automated promotions show up under Assets, labelled “Google AI” in the Added by column, but anything with zero impressions does not appear (Search Engine Land). There is no preview and no approval step.

Google has not said how it decides an offer is “high-quality,” how it reads conditions and end dates written into a sentence, or which countries are included. I have not seen it run in an account yet, so I can’t tell you how accurate it is. I would assume Canadian accounts are in, and deal with it before Monday instead of after.

Why this hits a contractor harder than a retailer

A retail site changes its offers every week and someone owns that job. Most contractor and manufacturer sites do not work that way. The spring special goes up in March and is still in the footer in October, because the phone kept ringing and nobody had a reason to look.

Three ways this goes wrong:

• The stale offer. Google’s daily check confirms the offer is still on your site. It does not confirm you still honour it.
• The conditions get dropped. “New customers only, jobs over CA$5,000, booked before April 30” is a sentence on your page. A promotion under an ad is a few words. A buyer who calls about the discount and hears the conditions second starts the conversation annoyed.
• The wrong buyer. If you quote custom work (a steel building, a commercial roof, a fabrication run), a discount line under your ad brings in price shoppers. I would much prefer the ad say what you build and where you build it.

It also lands on Thanksgiving Monday, when nobody is looking at the account.

Should you turn automated promotions off?

For most industrial and B2B companies, yes. You quote every job, you do not run public discounts, and there is nothing to gain from letting Google guess.

Leave it on if you are in home services, you run real seasonal offers (a furnace tune-up price, a fall cleanup package), and someone updates the website the day an offer ends.

The better option, if you do run offers, is to write the promotion yourself. Campaigns with a manual promotion are skipped by the automated system, and you control the wording, the conditions, and the end date. It takes about ten minutes.

What to do before Monday

1. Find every offer on your site. Search Google for site:yourdomain.ca plus words like “off,” “coupon,” “special,” “financing,” and “rebate.” Then check the footer, pop-ups, old landing pages, and old blog posts by hand.
2. Remove or update anything you would not honour on the phone today. This is worth doing whichever option you pick.
3. Pick one: off, on, or your own promotion. To turn it off, open Google Ads and go to Assets, then Account level automated assets, then the three-dot menu, then Advanced settings, and set Automated promotions to Off. The setting covers the whole account. There is no campaign-by-campaign control.
4. Check back the week of October 19. Go to Assets, filter to Promotion, and look for “Google AI” in the Added by column. If something is there that you did not write, you will know what Google found.

If someone else manages your ads, send them this and ask which of the three they chose.

Your website is ad copy now

This is the second time in two months Google has changed how an account behaves by default. In August it was how capped budgets bid. Now it is what your ads say. The fix is the same both times: someone has to open the account and look.

If your site has an offer on it right now, decide today whether you would put it in an ad. From Monday, Google decides for you.