Google Ads has quietly switched on a feature that reads the live promotions off an advertiser’s own website and inserts them into Search and Performance Max ads automatically, without anyone approving the specific offer. It was never announced through a blog post or a named spokesperson the way most Google Ads changes are. Instead, it surfaced in Google’s own help documentation in early September 2026, and was reported independently by several PPC trade publications within days of each other. For any Malaysian business running seasonal sales, branch-specific offers or a multilingual website, that quiet rollout is worth checking before an outdated or mismatched offer ends up in a live ad.

What’s actually changing

Google Ads Help now documents “automated promotions” as an account-level automated asset. In Google’s own words, the feature “highlights valid, high-quality deals and offers directly within your ads to drive both online and offline conversion discovery.” The confirmed mechanics, drawn from Google’s support documentation and corroborated by multiple independent PPC publications reporting on it in early September 2026:

  • Google’s systems scan an advertiser’s website and landing pages for active promotional language — a percentage discount, a buy-one-get-one offer, a seasonal sale — and automatically build a promotion asset from it.
  • It applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns that already have Location Assets attached.
  • It is enabled automatically at the account level. This is opt-out, not opt-in: there is no approval step for each promotion before it appears in a live ad.
  • A campaign is skipped if it already has a manual promotion asset running, so existing manually-configured promotions take precedence.
  • Sourced promotions are re-verified against the live page roughly every 24 hours, which means a promotion removed from a website doesn’t necessarily disappear from ads instantly.

Advertisers can turn the feature off entirely through account-level automated asset settings, or keep it switched off for a specific campaign simply by adding a manual promotion asset of their own.

Why this one is easy to miss

Most Google Ads platform changes MRVS has covered recently — the removal of language targeting, the automatic migration of Search campaigns to AI Max — came with a dated blog post and an on-record quote from Google’s Ads Liaison team. This one didn’t. It appeared as a help-centre update, which is exactly the kind of change that’s easy for a busy in-house marketer to miss, because there’s no account notification banner demanding a decision and no press cycle pointing at it.

It’s also worth separating this from a different, more restricted feature with a similar name. Google Merchant Center runs its own “automated promotions” programme for Shopping ads and free listings, which remains in a closed beta limited to a specific list of countries that does not include Malaysia. The account-level feature described here is different: it sits inside Google Ads itself, applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns with Location Assets, and Google has not published any country eligibility list restricting it. In practice, that means there’s no confirmed reason to assume a Malaysian account is exempt, even though Google hasn’t explicitly confirmed Malaysia is included either. The safest assumption is that it may already be active on an eligible account, not that it will arrive at some future date.

What this means for Malaysian businesses

Malaysian marketing calendars run on short, high-intensity promotional windows — Raya, Merdeka, 9.9, 11.11, 12.12, year-end sales — and it’s common for a campaign banner, a sitewide discount bar or an old landing page section to stay live for days or weeks after the promotion itself has technically ended, simply because nobody got round to removing it. That’s precisely the content this feature is designed to pick up. An expired 20% off banner left on a homepage after a campaign closes isn’t just a stale page anymore; it’s a plausible source for a live Google ad promising a discount that no longer exists.

Multilingual websites add a second layer most global commentary on this feature hasn’t addressed. Google hasn’t published guidance on how the system handles non-English promotional copy, and a typical Malaysian site runs Bahasa Malaysia, English and sometimes Chinese content side by side, often with offers phrased slightly differently across each version. Whether the system reliably extracts the correct offer, and the correct conditions attached to it, from a non-English page is genuinely untested in public, not confirmed either way.

There’s also a compliance angle worth more weight in Malaysia than the generic “broken customer experience” framing most coverage of this feature uses. An ad that states a discount or offer a business can no longer honour isn’t only a conversion-rate problem; depending on how it’s worded, it edges toward the kind of misleading price or promotion claim that sits under Malaysia’s consumer protection and trade description rules. A business that didn’t write the ad copy itself, because Google’s system extracted it automatically, still carries that exposure.

What to check in your account now

  • Check whether automated promotions are already active by reviewing the Assets section of any Search or Performance Max campaign that has Location Assets attached.
  • Audit live website and landing pages for expired promotional banners, sticky bars or footer offers, including versions in Bahasa Malaysia and Chinese, not just the English homepage.
  • Confirm any offer currently live on your website includes its real conditions — minimum spend, eligible products, expiry date — on the same page, rather than in a separate terms page the system may not read.
  • Add a manual promotion asset to any campaign where you need precise control over exactly what offer appears and when, since this removes that campaign from automatic extraction.
  • If an agency or in-house team manages the account, ask directly whether this has already been reviewed, since there’s no account notification forcing the conversation.
  • Build the 24-hour re-verification delay into how quickly you expect a removed promotion to clear from live ads, rather than assuming it happens the moment the website changes.

What to watch next

Google hasn’t published a formal announcement, a country eligibility list or guidance on multilingual handling for this feature, which means all three could still appear or change without much notice — this is a quietly-shipped feature, not a finished, fully-documented one. It’s also worth watching whether the separate, geographically-limited Merchant Center automated promotions programme eventually expands to Southeast Asia, since that would bring the same underlying idea to Shopping ads and free listings as well as Search.

None of this requires panicking about a feature most accounts won’t notice immediately. But it’s a different category of risk to most Google Ads updates: it can put words in your ad that you didn’t write and might not be able to honour, drawn from a page you may not have checked recently. That’s worth a short website and account audit rather than waiting to find out from a customer who turned up expecting a discount that had already ended. MRVS’s Advertising Services team can review whether this is active on your account and check it against your current campaign structure, and our Website Design & Development team can help clear outdated promotional content from a site that’s quietly been feeding the wrong offer into your ads. If you’ve already had a Search campaign auto-migrated to AI Max this year, it’s worth reading that alongside what to check when Google auto-upgrades your account without asking first, since the pattern of default-on change is the same.