Google Ads will begin pulling discount offers from advertiser sites and attaching them to campaigns on October 12, 2026, according to an email notice that Search Engine Roundtable published on October 5, 2026. Enrolment is automatic, and according to Google the opt-out remains available "at any time" through one account-level setting.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable wrote that the email went to some advertisers and that Arpan Banerjee passed the text to him through LinkedIn. The feature itself launched some time ago, according to Schwartz, so the message works as Google's way of informing advertisers about a function that already exists.

In Short

Google Ads is going to read the pages of certain advertisers' sites, find discount offers, and add them to ads on October 12, 2026. It affects certain Search and automated campaigns tied to physical business locations, and it is switched on by default, so ads can carry offers that nobody entered in the account. Anyone who does not want it can turn it off in one account setting, and offers that never got shown stay out of the reports.

What the email says

The notice is headed "Automated promotions for campaigns with location assets" and runs in four labelled parts: what is changing, why the change is described as beneficial, how the new assets are reported, and how to opt out. According to Google, the system will "automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions" from an advertiser's site from October 12, 2026, with discount offers and deals as the stated examples, and then apply them to campaigns. The resulting promotion assets are "designed to improve" ad performance by giving users valid offers "without requiring any manual setup", according to the email.

Scope and eligibility

A limiting note follows. The functionality "currently only applies" to Search and Performance Max campaigns that have linked location assets and that do not already carry promotion assets, according to Google. Location assets attach a business address from a linked profile to ads on Search and Maps, and they do not require a verified profile. The feature is therefore aimed at advertisers with physical premises and at least one campaign without a manually created promotion. The word "currently" is Google's own, and the email gives no indication of whether the scope will widen or which campaign types might follow.

Google presents the mechanism as a saving of labour. Its "automated promotion sourcing mechanism eliminates manual effort", the email states, and ensures "only valid, high-quality promotions" are linked to campaigns, with the aim of driving "online and offline results at scale". What counts as valid, and how that is assessed, is not described.

Reporting and controls

Once the new assets begin serving, they appear in the Assets section of the account, and Google says they can be managed directly, as with other assets. Visibility has a boundary: assets that have served to users are shown, while "Assets with zero impressions won't appear," according to the notice. By that description, the Assets view records only offers that have already been displayed. An offer that Google extracted and attached but that never won an impression would leave no entry.

On enrolment, Google writes that it is "automatically opting" advertisers in so that they benefit from the function, while advertisers retain "full control". The switch sits in the account-level automated assets settings: find Automated Promotions and select Off. The setting applies to the account as a whole, and the email names no campaign-level control. Questions are directed to account management teams and to a Help Center article titled "About account level automated assets".

How the notice surfaced

Search Engine Roundtable published the item with a timestamp of 7:41 am on October 5, 2026. Schwartz described the arrangement as opt-out, with Google enrolling accounts automatically from October 12, according to Search Engine Roundtable. A forum discussion of the email was also held on LinkedIn, the page notes.

An earlier item on the same feature came from PPC News Feed. Its page carries the date September 2, 2026 and describes automated promotions as a new account-level automated asset. According to PPC News Feed, Google scans landing pages for active promotional offers, with "20% off black sweaters" given as an example, then creates a promotion asset and attaches it to eligible Search and Performance Max ads. The item says the aim is to lift online purchases and store visits, that campaigns already running manual promotion assets are skipped, and that each sourced promotion is eligible for less than 24 hours before it must be re-verified. PPC News Feed credits Hana Kobzová with spotting the update.

The dates do not line up neatly. PPC Land's coverage of September 8, 2026 places Kobzová's find of a help document on September 7, five days after the date shown on the PPC News Feed page. Neither source explains the gap.

The two September items also differ on controls. PPC Land's report noted that the help document did not describe an explicit opt-out, with guidance limited to keeping promotional details on a site current or uploading specific promotions manually. PPC News Feed's summary, by contrast, already pointed to an opt-out in the account-level automated assets settings. The October email settles the point in Google's own words, with a named switch and a stated path to it.

Technical detail: what is being generated

A promotion asset is not free text. In the Google Ads API it is represented as a promotion feed item, with fields for occasion, discount modifier, promotion target, a percentage or monetary discount, an orders-over amount, a promotion code, and start and end dates. Google Ads API v21 widened PromotionAssets support to cover terms and service documentation, QR codes and several barcode formats. None of the documents reviewed says which of those fields the extraction populates, or how a start and end date would be read from a page that states an offer in prose.

Two rules shape which campaigns take part. According to Google, campaigns that already have promotion assets attached are outside the scope, and PPC News Feed phrases the same limit as skipping any campaign that runs manual promotion assets. Manual configuration therefore takes precedence over sourcing. The second rule is the verification cycle: less than 24 hours of eligibility for each sourced promotion, according to PPC News Feed, which implies repeated reads of the same pages. Google's email says nothing about crawl frequency or about what happens when a page still shows an offer that has lapsed.

One word, three features

The name is crowded. PPC News Feed stresses that its item concerns promotion assets for Search and Performance Max, and not "Automated Promotions", a separate feature in Merchant Center. Merchant Center promotions are supplied by merchants, and have received additions of their own: a first-order discount condition became available in December 2024, and audience targeting arrived on November 6, 2025 with new-customer and location options. A third, unrelated feature, promotion mode, entered beta for Search and Performance Max with a June 15, 2026 announcement, adjusts ROAS tolerance and budgets during peak periods and never displays an offer. The same noun now names a feed attribute, an ad asset and a bidding mode.

Context: a recurring template for automated enrolment

The notice follows a pattern that PPC Land has traced across several Google products in 2026, though the controls differ from case to case.

Against that record, the control described in the October email is a single account-level switch that does not depend on a representative. It remains a default-on arrangement, and the notice period reported publicly is short: seven days separate Search Engine Roundtable's October 5 item from the October 12 start.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Accuracy is the first question. In its September 8 analysis, PPC Land observed that an advertisement carrying a specific discount claim is a legal representation as well as a marketing one, and that the source of truth for that claim becomes a page on the advertiser's site read by a parser. Expired offers, regional pricing, conditional discounts and promotional pages left up after a sale ended are ordinary features of retail sites and all potential inputs. The 24-hour re-verification narrows the window in which a stale offer could run, but the documents do not define how a lapsed offer is recognised.

Reporting is the second. Because zero-impression assets are not listed, an advertiser reviewing the Assets section sees what has served rather than what Google has queued. The record of attached offers is therefore retrospective by design.

Location-asset campaigns are the third. These campaigns carry the local inventory that PPC Land followed earlier this year, when it reported a 733% increase in local pack ads over three months, with participation relying on location assets. Offers are also moving closer to the point of purchase in Google's wider plans: at Google Marketing Live on May 20, 2026 the keynote showed a native checkout button in a Direct Offer that applies a discount through a one-time code. Page-sourced promotions on Search and Performance Max are a separate mechanism, though they draw on the same underlying commodity: structured offer data.

Several matters remain unaddressed by the documents reviewed. The email went to "some advertisers", according to Search Engine Roundtable, and the count of enrolled accounts is not given. Regions and languages are not stated. Neither the criteria for "high-quality" nor the handling of disputed or disapproved offers is set out. The Help Center article that the email cites, "About account level automated assets", was not among the attached material.

Timeline

Summary

  • Who: Google Ads, advertisers with Search and Performance Max campaigns that have linked location assets; reported by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, with the email passed on by Arpan Banerjee, and earlier noted by PPC News Feed.
  • What: An email notice that Google Ads will automatically identify and extract promotions from advertiser sites and apply them as promotion assets, with automatic enrolment and an account-level opt-out under Automated Promotions in the automated assets settings.
  • When: The notice was published on October 5, 2026, and extraction starts on October 12, 2026. A PPC News Feed item is dated September 2, 2026, and PPC Land's coverage places the help document on September 7, 2026.
  • Where: Google Ads accounts, in Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets that have no promotion assets attached. Regions are not specified.
  • Why: According to Google, the mechanism removes manual effort and links only valid, high-quality promotions to campaigns to support online and offline results at scale. For the marketing community the open questions concern accuracy of sourced offers, visibility in reporting and the default-on enrolment.