Google Ads Switches Promotions On by Default on 12 October. You Are Still Liable.

⚙️ A setting nobody has to touch

On 12 October 2026, Google Ads starts extracting promotional offers from advertiser websites and attaching them to eligible campaigns as promotion assets. The setting is on by default at the account level, and Google is enrolling accounts automatically. Advertisers who want out have to go and find the switch.

An email announcing the change reached "some advertisers", according to Search Engine Roundtable, which published the text on 5 October 2026. Coverage since then has concentrated on the mechanics. The part worth slowing down on is who carries the claim.

Google's own help documentation asks advertisers to keep their website's promotional details up to date and to comply with advertising policy. The advertiser, in other words, is accountable for wording the advertiser did not write, did not approve, and may not see before it runs.

That is a new shape of exposure. It is also, for anyone planning a China campaign, a familiar shape running in reverse — more on that below.

📄 What Google documented in September, and what the email added in October

The feature is not new. Google published help documentation on automated promotions on 7 September 2026. A help article that still carries step-by-step instructions for turning the setting on, ending with an option labelled "On (recommended)", suggests the switch previously required an active choice in at least some accounts. What the October email changed is the default and the date.

Two things the email does not settle. It names no countries and no languages, and it did not go to all advertisers. An account owner who did not receive it should not read that as proof the account is outside scope. Google's help documentation describes the feature in general terms and names no market exclusions either.

Nor has Google said how many accounts already had the setting on, or whether an account that had previously chosen Off will keep that choice after 12 October. Checking the setting on or after the date is the only way to be sure.

🔍 The four details that decide your exposure

Eligibility is narrower than the headlines suggest. Three conditions have to hold: an active Search or Performance Max campaign, location assets attached, and no manual promotions currently running on that campaign. Google's help article says this includes Local Ad campaigns. A campaign already running a manual promotion is bypassed. If no campaign in the account has location assets linked, the feature does not apply at all.

Each promotion serves for under 24 hours. After that it may be re-enabled, but only while Google's systems can keep verifying that the offer is still visible on the website.

Google cannot yet read start and end dates off a page. The help article says this is expected to change once promotion start and end dates can be extracted. Until then, the system's test of whether an offer is live is whether the offer is still visible. A sale banner left standing after the sale ends still reads as a live offer to a machine. The advertiser's own webpage is the signal.

Assets with zero impressions do not appear in reporting. Promotion assets appear in the Assets view only once they have served. An offer Google attached but never showed leaves no record. The audit trail covers what ran, not what was generated.

⚖️ Who carries the claim

This is where the change stops being an efficiency story.

A promotion asset is an assertion of price and terms, published under the advertiser's name, in an ad the advertiser did not author. The ceiling for misleading commercial practices in the United Kingdom is a fine of up to 10% of global turnover, according to analysis by Osborne Clarke. That is a ceiling rather than a typical penalty, but it sets the order of magnitude for how a wrong price claim is treated.

One consequence is easy to miss. If a brand distributes through retailers under a minimum advertised price agreement, an automatically extracted discount can breach it. The illustration in circulation is a 10% site banner turning a $4,200 item into a claim of roughly $3,780. That is a hypothetical, not a documented case, and it is included here to show the mechanism rather than to claim it has happened.

Google also says broader campaign performance "often improves significantly" when promotions run, even where clicks on the promotion itself look low. The help page offers no figures behind that. Third-party estimates of the click-through effect range from roughly 10% to 20% depending on the publisher. When a spread that wide circulates without a primary figure, the number worth trusting is the account's own.

✅ Three responses, and one audit

Leave it on, and clean the website. The practical control is the page. Every expired offer still visible is a live input. Search your own site for "off", "sale", "free", "offer", "discount" and the percent sign, then take down or clearly end what no longer applies. Put an offer's conditions in the same sentence as the headline discount rather than in the small print, because the extraction reads what is prominent.

Use manual promotions as circuit breakers. A campaign running a manual promotion is bypassed by the automated system. Where wording has to be exact, a manually loaded promotion asset gives the advertiser the text and the dates, and keeps the automation away from that campaign. It also means somebody has to keep those assets current.

Switch it off at the account level. There is no campaign-level toggle. Turning automated promotions off is one account-wide decision, and it can be revisited later.

Then audit. In Assets, filter by asset type and select Promotion. Assets Google added carry "Google AI" in the Added by column, and hovering shows the sourcing detail. Check a week after any change rather than once — and remember the limit above: anything that never served will not be listed.

🌏 The same decision, decided the other way in China

This is the part that matters if China is on your roadmap.

Google's model runs the automation first and leaves the advertiser accountable afterwards. Advertising in China runs the opposite sequence. A creative is filed and reviewed against permitted phrasing before it runs, industry by industry. Rejection arrives at submission, with no advance warning. A claim that performs in another market can be refused in China because of how it is phrased rather than what it says.

The two regimes push the same function to different points in the process.

The practical consequence is that one global creative-governance process does not survive contact with both. A team that has learned to trust platform automation will systematically under-invest in pre-clearance, and pre-clearance is what decides whether a China campaign launches on schedule. A team that has learned to file everything first will find the Google default irritating rather than dangerous.

Neither posture travels. That is the finding.

🏢 Where Baidu PPC Pro comes in

The China side of that split has four prerequisites, and none of them change when Google changes a default.

An account without a Chinese entity. Baidu requires a Chinese business licence to open an advertising account. Most overseas brands do not hold one, and obtaining one takes months. Baidu PPC Pro opens and manages the account without it. That is the step which decides whether a brand can be in a Chinese auction at all.

A keyword map built from local terms. Chinese consumers search the local term for the category, the local term for the feature, and the local phrase for the problem they want solved. A translated keyword list reaches people and then fails to match them. The comparison queries that carry the highest intent have to be built from observed search behaviour.

Creative that clears review the first time. Industry-specific claim phrasing, review-safe wording for health and efficacy, and correct handling of restricted store-description terms — resolved before submission rather than after rejection.

Landing pages that answer the search. Chinese-language pages that resolve the comparison the user just typed. Traffic to a page that reads as translated is traffic already paid for and then lost.

📅 What to watch after 12 October, and notes on the source

Three things are worth tracking once the default takes effect.

1. Whether the scope widens. Google's own wording is that the feature "currently" applies to Search and Performance Max with location assets, which leaves the door open.
2. Whether automated extraction of promotion start and end dates arrives. That single change would remove the expired-offer problem.
3. Whether accounts that had already selected Off keep that setting. Google has not said.

Notes on the source:

• The change was announced in an email published by Search Engine Roundtable on 5 October 2026 and reported as reaching "some advertisers". The underlying feature was documented in Google's help article "About automated promotions" on 7 September 2026.
• Separating what the help article states from what the email added follows the sourcing set out by Relevant Audience, which distinguishes the two.
• The minimum-advertised-price example is a hypothetical published by Ecommerce Paradise, not a documented case.
• The United Kingdom turnover figure is a statutory ceiling cited by Osborne Clarke, not an observed penalty.
• Third-party click-through estimates vary by publisher and no primary figure has been published. No specific estimate is asserted here as fact.