by Austin LeClear
on June 13, 2025
If you’ve checked your inbox recently and caught a message from Google titled something like “We’ll now automatically display relevant information from your marketing emails,” your first reaction was probably:
“Wait… what?”
If so, you’re not alone.
This latest move from Google is raising eyebrows — and for good reason. In classic Google fashion, it sounds helpful on the surface. But when you look under the hood, it’s another automated “feature” that could cause chaos for marketers who like control.
In this post, we’ll break down what this means for you. Prefer video? Check out our video NEW Google Ads Update: Google Will Automatically Display Promos from Your Marketing Emails below:
Still with us? Good, let’s dive in.
What Is Google Doing, Exactly?
In short, Google Ads is now scanning your marketing emails — yes, the ones you send through Klaviyo, Mailchimp, etc. — and pulling promotion details like coupon codes, sales, and limited-time offers directly from them. Then, they automatically display those promotions in:
- Google Shopping listings
- Search ads
- And maybe more down the line.
No manual setup. No notification. Just — boom — it’s live.
Sounds convenient?
Sure. If you don’t care about accuracy, tracking, or customer confusion.
Why This Is a Problem
Let’s say you’re running a subscriber-only 10% off promo. It’s just for your email list.
Now, thanks to this setting, Google grabs that promo and slaps it on your Shopping ads for the world to see.
This might:
- Cannibalize your margins.
- Confuse customers who saw a different deal elsewhere.
- Clash with promotions you’ve already built manually inside Google Ads or Merchant Center.
Plus, if you’re running multiple promotions at the same time, things could get confusing fast.
Kirk Williams — who runs a respected PPC agency — said it well in a recent tweet:
“We’re making it an internal policy to opt out of this for our clients. Past experience with Google automated promotion features has often created more confusion than value.”
Hard agree.
Why We’re Turning It Off (For All Clients)
At our agency, we’re already building out promotions manually, with care:
- Inside Google Merchant Center accounts, where we have version control and end dates.
- Inside our clients’ Google Ads accounts, where we match the promotion to campaign objectives.
When Google hijacks that logic with auto-scraped email offers? That control goes out the window.
We’ve seen it before: automated extensions, auto-applied recommendations, auto-generated assets. Sometimes they help. Often they don’t.
At Grow My Ads, we don’t want to be in a situation where a client Googles their product and sees the wrong promotion details.
Who Is This Actually For?
Honestly? Lazy advertisers.
If you’re too hands-off to build a promotions feed manually — or your client doesn’t care about what’s shown in shopping ads — this can be left on. But if you’re reading this, odds are you’re not in that boat.
You care. You watch your spend. You likely test and track. You optimize.
So don’t let Google play fast and loose with your promotions.
How to Turn This Off in Merchant Center
Here’s how to opt out:
- Log into your Google Merchant Center account
- Click the gear icon in the upper right (Settings)
- Choose General account settings
- Scroll to “Marketing content usage”
- Select “Do not share data”
- Hit Save
Done.
No more Google Merchant Center promotions being lifted from your emails and showing up in ads you didn’t authorize.
But What If It Works?
We get it. This feature might evolve into something useful. There’s a chance Google starts doing this in a smarter, more controllable way.
But until they:
- Give us better visibility,
- Let us review and approve before publishing,
- And keep it separate from manually created promotions…
We’re staying out.
This is one of those cases where more automation ≠ better outcomes (at least for now).
What This Means for Email Marketers
If you’re running campaigns with pre-set promotion categories where promotions differ by list segment, geography, or timing — this feature could interfere with that significantly.
Imagine this scenario:
- You send a VIP-only promotion
- Google pulls it and makes it public
- Now regular customers get annoyed they weren’t “special”
- Your support inbox lights up
- You lose trust
Your email strategy isn’t supposed to be public-facing. It’s targeted, time-bound, and curated, with a clear promotion start date and highly targeted audience. Letting Google rifle through it and pick what it wants undermines all of that.
The Bottom Line
If you’re serious about your marketing, you want:
- Control
- Clarity
- Consistency
This new Google setting doesn’t support any of those.
Turn it off. Run your promotions manually. Sleep better.
TL;DR
- Google is scraping promotions from your marketing emails and showing them in your Shopping ads as Google Merchant Center promotions.
- This is on by default unless you opt out.
- It can lead to confusion, mismatched offers, and promotions feed chaos.
- Kirk Williams is turning it off for all his clients — and so are we.
- You should too.
Take 60 Seconds and Opt Out Now
Head to your Merchant Center > Settings > General > Marketing Content Usage > Do Not Share
Click Save.
Then go back to running smart, clean, intentional promotions that your team actually controls.
If you want Google managing your entire funnel, go for it. But if you want your ads to reflect your strategy — not their guesswork — take the wheel back.
