The Google Ads Feature Most Advertisers Should Turn Off Now

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Where Your Budget Is Quietly Leaking

One area where we consistently find wasted budget in Google Ads accounts is within Assets — formerly known as extensions for those of you who’ve been around Google Ads for a while.

Google now automatically creates assets for your campaigns. That includes structured snippets, callouts, and sitelinks. The idea is that Google will generate these to “help” your business. But as we often find with Google’s automations, your understanding of your business is going to be far better than Google’s.

The Problem with Auto-Created Assets

Here’s what we’ve found across multiple account audits:

Structured snippets that aren’t quite accurate or relevant
Callouts that are outdated or flat-out wrong
Sitelinks that go to pages you don’t want traffic sent to

That last one — sitelinks — is where things can really go sideways.

A Real-World Example

We audited an account where the client was running a test sending all paid traffic to dedicated landing pages, not their main website. They noticed traffic was still going to their main website and couldn’t figure out why.

When we investigated, we found the culprit: Google had automatically created sitelink assets pointing to pages on the main website. You can identify these because they’re labeled “automatically created” rather than “advertiser” in the assets section.

These auto-created sitelinks were getting clicked. Real budget was being spent sending users to pages the client explicitly didn’t want them landing on — completely undermining the landing page test they were running.

How to Turn Off Auto-Created Assets

Here’s the step-by-step process:

In your Google Ads account, go to the far right menu
Click More > Account level automated assets
Click Advanced settings (also on the far right)
You’ll see settings for every type of automatically created asset
Go into each one and turn it off

That’s it. Go through each asset type — structured snippets, callouts, sitelinks, and the rest — and disable them.

Should You Turn Off Everything?

In most cases, yes. There might be edge cases where leaving location assets on makes sense, but more often than not, you can and should fill these in yourself. You’ll do a better job than Google’s automation because you actually understand your business, your messaging, and where you want traffic going.

Key Takeaways

Check your Assets section for anything labeled “automatically created” — those are Google’s, not yours
Auto-created sitelinks can send traffic to pages you don’t want, wasting budget and undermining tests
Turn off all auto-created assets at the account level and create your own manually
Make this part of every account audit — it’s one of the fastest wins you can find

If you’re not sure what else might be leaking budget in your Google Ads account, book a call and we’ll run through it with you.