Google turns on Local Inventory Ads Aug 31, no opt-out

On August 31, 2026, Local Inventory Ads turn on for every Google Shopping campaign, and the switch that used to turn them off stops working. If you sell online and also have a physical location, Google is about to start advertising your shelf against your warehouse — using the same budget. You have four weeks to decide whether that's what you want.

What actually happened

Google published the change on July 20 via the Google Ads Developer Blog. Starting August 31, the Campaign.ShoppingSetting.enable_local field is ignored for Shopping campaigns — Google treats it as true no matter what you send. On Google Ads API v25.1 and later, code that tries to set it to false gets back a ContextError.OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT. On earlier versions, per PPC Land's reporting, the false is swallowed silently — no error, no opt-out.

The "Local products" dropdown disappears from campaign settings at the same time. The practical effect lands on accounts linked to a Merchant Center with the LIA add-on and a local product feed; if you have no local feed, the flag flips and nothing serves.

The replacement control is the inventory filter. You separate online and local spend with campaign criteria on product_channel — ONLINE or LOCAL — instead of a single boolean per campaign. That's a different mechanism, not a renamed one, and it does not migrate itself.

Why Local Inventory Ads matter for your business

Two things break quietly here, and both are the kind that show up as a bad month rather than an error.

First, your budget stops meaning what it meant. A Shopping campaign you built and benchmarked as online-only can now serve local traffic out of the same pool. Conversion rate, ROAS, cost per order — all of it shifts because the traffic mix shifted, not because anything got better or worse. If you re-baseline after the fact you'll be guessing at the cause.

Second, your local feed becomes load-bearing. LIA serves against store-level inventory. Stale quantities, missing store codes, or a Merchant Center feed nobody has touched in a year now decide whether Google sends someone to a store shelf that's empty. That's a real customer walking into a real disappointment.

Before the 31st: audit any script or integration that writes enable_local, add explicit inventory filters to campaigns you need kept online-only, and pull a clean two-week performance baseline you can compare against afterward. The last one takes twenty minutes and is the only reason you'll be able to explain September.

Sources: Google Ads Developer Blog, PPC Land.