Google Ads Assets: The Complete Guide (Formerly Ad Extensions)

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated August 17, 2026

Google renamed ad extensions to assets back in 2022. I still prefer the old name, because that is exactly what they are: an extension of your ad. They are the pieces Google attaches around your headlines and descriptions to make your ad bigger, more useful, and more clickable. Here is my honest confession before we start. While putting this together I looked at a campaign I had recently launched and realized it had literally no assets on it. I built it quickly, told myself I would go back and add them, and never did. Do not follow that example. This walks through every asset type, which ones I recommend, which ones I would skip, and the one setting I would turn off today.

1What assets are and why they matter

Assets are the parts of your advertisement beyond the headline and description. Sitelinks, callouts, images, your phone number, your logo, your address. Do a Google search right now and look at the ads. Depending on whether you searched for a local doctor, an ecommerce product, or a contractor, you will see completely different ad formats, and the difference is which assets those advertisers have built out.

Here is the part that makes them worth the effort. You get performance reports on every individual asset. Every single sitelink variation, every headline, every long headline. Google takes your ads and your assets, works out what performs, and assembles what it believes will be the best-performing combination based on the conversion data coming into your account.

That means assets are not decoration. They are inputs into an optimization system, and if you only give it three sitelinks and no images, you have handed it very little to work with.

Across the account you can build headlines, long headlines, descriptions, horizontal images, square images, vertical images, logos, YouTube videos, and HTML5 ads. There is an Asset Studio now for creating them directly inside the platform.

My recommendation is simple: turn on every asset type that fits your business. That does not mean use every single one. Some are genuinely not worth it, and I will tell you which as we go.

One honest caveat. Asset performance data gets much more useful on accounts spending real money with a lot of campaigns and a lot of history. On a small account you will have the assets in place long before you have enough data to rank them. Build them anyway, because they help immediately by making your ad take up more space.

Question to Answer:

Open one of your campaigns right now. How many asset types does it actually have filled out?

2Listen to the full episode

I go through every asset type one by one in this episode, with live search examples showing how each one appears in real ads.

Surfside PPC Podcast Episode 29: Google Ads Assets

Question to Answer:

Search your main keyword and look at the top ads. Which assets are your competitors using that you are not?

3Business name and business logo

These two are the fastest wins in the entire list, and a surprising number of advertisers skip them.

Business name. Add it at the account level, or set it per campaign if you need to. It should be your actual business name, or something matching your URL. If my domain were surfsidemarketing.com, "Surfside Marketing" would work fine as the business name.

Here is why it matters. When I searched plumber near me, one of the top advertisers had neither a business name nor a logo attached. Their ad showed a raw URL where the business name should be. A competitor further down had both, and their ad looked like a brand rather than a link.

Business logo. Upload a square logo, and think of it as an icon rather than a logo. Google shrinks it down to roughly favicon size in the ad. If you upload a wide, text-heavy logo with your full company name in it, nobody will be able to read any of it.

If your brand has a mark or symbol separate from the wordmark, use the symbol. That is what will actually be legible at the size Google displays it.

Question to Answer:

Does your ad show your business name and a readable logo, or a bare URL?

4Image assets

Upload multiple images and let Google figure out which ones perform. Whatever gets the best results is what gets served most often.

What works depends on the business:

• Medical practices. Photos of the doctor. Patients want to see who they would be seeing.
• Service businesses. Your team, people actually working, crew members standing by the truck. Real work in progress.
• Professional services. A real human being. I have seen this work well for marketing companies, where a founder photo does more than an abstract graphic.
• Products. The product itself, clearly, on a clean background.

In that plumber search, the top advertisers were showing multiple image assets each, and it made their listings take up dramatically more of the page than the text-only ads below them.

The general rule is that real photos of real people and real work outperform stock photography. But upload a range and let the data decide rather than guessing.

Question to Answer:

Do you have at least four or five images uploaded, including photos of actual people at your business?

5Sitelinks, the biggest lever

If you only fix one asset type, make it this one. Sitelinks are additional links shown beneath your ad, each with its own description.

Run at least four. Realistically you should run at least six. An HVAC company can easily justify eight.

The way to think about them is that sitelinks are how you sell your different services. Each one is another reason for somebody to click, and another entry point into your site.

Include your specialties. If you are the shop that does European car repair, that deserves its own sitelink, because the person searching for it is going to convert at a much higher rate than a general searcher.

Write the descriptions. Each sitelink gets two description lines beneath it. Most advertisers leave these blank, which wastes real estate and makes the sitelink less compelling.

Send them to pages that convert. This is the part people get wrong. A sitelink pointing at a page with no call to action is a click you paid for and lost. Point them at pages built to sell your services and drive contacts.

Question to Answer:

How many sitelinks are running in each of your campaigns, and do they all have descriptions written?

6Callouts and structured snippets

Callouts are short selling points, 25 characters or less, that appear as a line of text under your ad. They are not clickable. Their job is to answer questions and remove hesitation fast.

The rule is do not repeat your headlines word for word. If your headline already says plumber near me, your callouts should be doing different work:

• Financing Available or 24-Month Financing
• 5 Star Rated
• 500+ Reviews
• In Business 20+ Years
• Licensed & Insured
• Same-Day Service

Think about the quick reservations somebody has before calling a business like yours, and answer them here. Cost, trust, availability, and credentials cover most of it.

Structured snippets work differently. You pick a header from Google's list, then list values under it. List at least four.

The header options cover brands, courses, degree programs, destinations, featured hotels, models, neighborhoods, service catalog, and more. Pick the one that genuinely fits. Service catalog is the right choice for most service businesses.

The value of a structured snippet is that somebody scanning the results can immediately confirm you offer the specific thing they need.

Question to Answer:

Do your callouts say something your headlines do not already say?

7Call assets replaced call-only ads

This comes up constantly. People ask how to run call-only ads, and the answer is that you do not anymore. Call assets replaced them. You add a call asset to your Responsive Search Ads and that is how you drive phone calls now.

A call asset puts your phone number into the ad so somebody can call you directly without visiting your site. On mobile it becomes a tap-to-call button. On desktop it displays the number, and Google tracks calls placed to it.

Schedule them. You can set call assets to appear only during hours when somebody can actually answer. Worth doing, because a call that rings out is worse than no call.

If phone calls are the entire goal, Local Services Ads are the more direct option, since you pay per lead rather than per click. Worth knowing though: LSAs deliver both calls and messages. You can turn the message feature off, but you tend to get fewer total leads when you do. That is a tradeoff to make deliberately rather than by accident.

For most advertisers the right answer is running both. Local Services Ads above, Search campaigns with call assets underneath.

Question to Answer:

Do your Search ads have a call asset, and is it scheduled to your actual business hours?

8Location and price assets

Location assets are one of the most important on this list, and the setup is a single step: link your Google Business Profile to Google Ads.

Once linked, your ads can display your address and hours directly. In that plumber search, one of the advertisers was showing their address and "open 24 hours" right in the ad. That is a meaningful trust signal for somebody choosing a local contractor, and it costs nothing beyond making the connection.

Worth noting how seriously some businesses take this. Service-based companies without a storefront are acquiring physical addresses specifically so they can run location assets and build a better map presence in Google. That tells you how much weight the local signal carries.

Price assets let you list services with starting prices, displayed as cards beneath your ad. A pest control company might show:

• Termite Inspection. $99
• Quarterly Service. Starting price per quarter
• Annual Termite Control. $350 per year

When you build one you set a header, the type, currency, the price qualifier such as per unit, per hour, per week, or per month, a description, and a final URL pointing to where that service actually lives on your site.

The one rule: make sure the prices match reality. If your ad says $99 and the page says $149, you have created a disconnect that costs you the lead and probably the trust. Only run price assets on services where you can stand behind the number.

Question to Answer:

Is your Google Business Profile linked to your Google Ads account?

9Promotions, apps, affiliate locations, and lead forms

Four asset types that are situational. Two are useful when they apply, two mostly are not.

Promotion assets. Genuinely good when you have a real sale. You pick an occasion such as Black Friday, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, or Mother's Day, enter the offer, and set an end date. Google displays it with a bold tag next to the offer so it stands out on the results page.

The end date is the underrated part. It means the promotion expires automatically, so you never end up running an expired offer because somebody forgot to pause it. Anyone who has advertised a sale that ended three weeks ago knows why that matters.

App assets. Only relevant if you have a mobile app and you want people using it rather than your mobile site. You see this constantly on travel searches, where a site like a hotel booking platform would rather push you into the app than the browser. If you do not have an app, skip it.

Affiliate location assets. These show where retailers stock your product. If you sell a consumer product carried in national chains, somebody doing a near me search can be shown that your product is available at their local store. Useful for consumer brands, irrelevant for everyone else. Not one I use often.

Lead form assets. This is the one I would actively avoid. Lead forms let somebody submit their information directly inside the search results without ever reaching your website.

That sounds efficient and it is the problem. Somebody who never visited your site has not read anything about you, has not seen your reviews, and has almost no commitment to the conversation. I would much rather get people onto the website where they either fill out a form or call after actually learning who you are.

If you are going to use them anyway, at minimum add qualifying questions so you are filtering out junk rather than collecting it.

Question to Answer:

Do you have a real promotion running that should have a promotion asset with an end date on it?

10Automatically created assets and the AI Max opt-in

This is the most important setting in this article and the reason I would go audit your campaigns today.

Automatically created assets is a campaign-level setting where Google generates headlines and descriptions for you, pulling from your landing pages and existing ads. You will find it in your campaign settings under asset optimization.

I would turn it off. The copy Google generates is not copy you wrote, it may not match how you position yourself, and you have limited control over what it says on your behalf.

Here is what changed, and why this now matters more. Google has restructured this setting so that opting into automatically created assets also opts you into AI Max for Search campaigns. The setting has been renamed to text customization and folded into that broader package.

AI Max loosens how your keywords match to searches and gives Google significantly more latitude over your targeting and your creative. That is a much bigger decision than "let Google suggest some headlines," and it is worth making deliberately rather than inheriting it through a checkbox you left on.

I would not recommend AI Max on most accounts, and I would especially not recommend it on a small budget, where loosened matching can consume your spend quickly. If you want to test it, test it on purpose in a campaign where you can measure the result, not by leaving an asset setting enabled.

What to do: open your Search campaigns, go to settings, find asset optimization or text customization, and confirm you know whether it is on. If it is on and you did not deliberately choose AI Max, turn it off.

Question to Answer:

Check one Search campaign's settings right now. Is text customization enabled, and did you choose that?