Google’s AI writes only positive summaries into Search ads

Only favourable points make it into the ad: the summaries are “positive only”, the help page says, and one appears only when Google’s systems expect it to lift the ad’s results. They run in any ad slot on Google.com for English-language searches in India, Australia, the UK and the US, and sensitive fields such as pharmaceuticals stay out.

Google treats the wording as the reviewers’ own voice, so the advertiser gets no edit button. PPC Land lists what the page leaves out: how many reviews a business needs, any instructions for turning the feature off, a sample of the text, a reporting column and even a publication date.

US law handles invented praise on its own track. Our guide to AI ad disclosure rules, updated 25 October 2026, lists the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR 465.2), in force since 21 October 2024, which bars fake testimonials and sets no AI label.

By Google’s account, the praise these ads carry in the four markets comes from reviews posted on other sites, and the help page offers no setting to change it, which makes those reviews the one input to this ad line an advertiser can still influence.