On October 12 — the very day this piece is published — Google Ads turns on automated promotions by default for advertisers who have location assets linked and haven't set up their own promotion assets yet. The system scans the advertiser's website, finds discounts and offers there, and turns them into promotional blocks for Search and Performance Max campaigns — without the account owner lifting a finger. In parallel, according to Search Engine Land, Google is rolling out A/B testing for creative within Performance Max asset groups and a beta tool that automatically translates campaigns into other languages and regions.
Why "on by default" isn't a minor detail
The key word here is opt-out, not opt-in. Google isn't asking permission in advance: if the advertiser does nothing, the system starts pulling promotions found on the site into ads right away. For a small business owner, that means an ad could start showing a discount that's long expired on the site, an offer valid at only one location, or wording that never went through a lawyer's or brand manager's review.
Picture a small coffee-shop chain whose website still has a "Promotions" page from last year advertising "second drink free on weekends" — long discontinued, but nobody remembered to take the page down. Without manual oversight, there's a real risk that exactly this offer gets picked up by the system and starts showing in search ads — and it won't be the marketing manager dealing with the annoyed customers at the register, it'll be the barista. The only way to avoid this is to go into the account's automated assets settings and turn off Automated Promotions ahead of time, or urgently clean up the website itself.
What's really behind Performance Max's "transparency"
The new A/B testing feature inside Performance Max is being pitched as a step toward more transparency in a tool advertisers have criticized for years as a "black box" — money goes out, and figuring out which creative actually worked is nearly impossible. Now advertisers can run a controlled test — comparing, say, a user-generated-style video against polished studio footage — and while the test runs, the asset group is locked against other edits so the result isn't skewed by unrelated changes.
Worth being honest here: the mere ability to test two creative versions doesn't make Performance Max transparent in any full sense. The algorithm that decides how to distribute impressions across formats and audiences is just as closed as before — only the creative gets tested, not PMax's own logic. It's a useful but limited improvement, not a fix for the fundamental "black box" problem agencies have been complaining about for years.
A similar caveat applies to the beta campaign-translation tool: it translates not just text but visual elements with on-image text, adapts targeting, and translates landing pages, which in theory could shrink entering a new market from weeks to hours. But it's still a beta, and the translated copy absolutely needs to be proofread by a native speaker — especially cultural references, legal phrasing, and local advertising rules, which generative translation doesn't always get right yet.
This matters most for franchises, multi-location chains, and any business where one person manages the ad account for several brands or stores at once: the more sites and landing pages are tied to a single account, the higher the odds that at least one of them still has an outdated or ambiguous promotion nobody got around to removing before October 12. A sensible minimum is to spend a day reviewing the "Automated assets" section in account settings, checking whether the feature is on, and, if the site has any old or ambiguous promotion, temporarily turning off Automated Promotions until the website itself — not the ad account — is cleaned up.
At Dayava we regularly manage clients' ad accounts, and it's exactly these moments — when a platform quietly changes its default behavior — where we usually find most of the "budget leaks" a business owner would never have spotted on their own.
Source: Search Engine Land, "Google Ads will automatically pull promotions from advertisers' websites"
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