Gmail’s automatic features limit marketer control and personalization
Email has evolved. It’s no longer just a broadcast tool, it’s a relationship channel. People subscribe to hear something specific from your brand. They expect relevance, not repetition. That’s why Gmail’s Automatic Extraction feature is a problem.
Gmail now uses AI to scan promotional emails and automatically surface key commercial elements, discounts, codes, expiration details, directly in the inbox preview. This may sound efficient. It’s not. It overrides the preview text crafted by marketers, the precise copy written to provide context or amplify a message just enough to drive the open. That message? Gone. Replaced with AI-selected fragments that often echo the subject line and add no new value. Redundant inputs are noise, not signal.
Brands can still try to control this with structured data, what’s called schema markup, to guide the extraction. But Gmail doesn’t consistently honor the schema. There’s no opt-out option for Automatic Extraction. So even if you go the extra mile, the result isn’t guaranteed. Most marketers are avoiding this because coding takes time, isn’t predictable, and worst of all, makes their emails look like ads. When everything looks like an ad, performance drops.
This change asks brands to compete harder for attention using fewer tools. Marketers now have just the subject line to differentiate and drive engagement. No preview text. No nuance. That weakens the ability to shape a unique message, especially in crowded inboxes.
The bigger risk? Generic experience. When brands sound the same, customers stop paying attention.
That’s not smart for anyone building long-term engagement with customers. Email should feel tailored. Precise. This isn’t about convenience, it’s about control. And Google is making it harder.
Deal annotations and deal cards favor uniform discount messaging
Google is steering email in the wrong direction. Deal Annotations and Deal Cards are built to simplify promotional content at scale, but they strip out what gives your brand a voice: personalization, nuance, and layered messaging.
Let’s start with Deal Annotations. They were introduced to give marketers more visual tools, schema-based enhancements like discount tags, expiration timers, even optional images. But few adopted it. Less than a few percentage points, according to reported results. Why? Because implementation took engineering resources, results were unclear, and emails began to resemble inbox ads. That’s a visual turn most brands don’t want. Fast forward to now. Gmail bypasses the opt-in model altogether. It uses AI to scan emails and pull discount details automatically, even when brands haven’t coded it in.
Then came Deal Cards. These appear inside the email after it’s opened and highlight discount-related content, no preview images, just plain text with promo codes and deadlines. Like Deal Annotations, they’re produced entirely through Automatic Extraction. And like annotations, they focus entirely on price, not on value, not on story, not on audience relevance.
This is backwards thinking. These AI-generated summaries prioritize one message at the cost of others. Most brands use secondary content to highlight new arrivals, high-margin categories, or products aligned to individual preferences. That’s how you differentiate. When Gmail turns every message into a discount summary, the secondary and personalized messages, often the ones that matter more, get ignored or dropped.
Decision-makers need to understand the downstream effect. If your campaign is reduced to a single, AI-filtered message, you lose flexibility. Your CRM strategy takes a hit, your segmentation matters less, and creative differentiation gets sidelined. Over time, your customer engagement erodes not because your offer was wrong, but because your message wasn’t fully delivered.
Executives should be asking: will these auto-generated cues push us toward uniformity? Because if yes, the cost isn’t just aesthetic, it’s strategic.
Marketing content usage undermines email opt-in exclusivity
With its Marketing Content Usage initiative, Google is treating subscriber-based content as public property. The program scrapes information from marketing emails, product launches, promotions, social links, and republishes it across Google-owned platforms like Search, Shopping, and Maps. No context. No segmentation. Just raw promotional output distributed at scale.
Here’s the issue: these emails were never meant for global display. They’re crafted for subscribers, people who’ve explicitly opted in to hear from a brand. That opt-in isn’t a legal formality. It’s the foundation of trust in digital marketing. It signals that a user wants a direct relationship. When Google bypasses that layer and extracts subscriber-exclusive content to publish broadly, it dilutes that exchange.
Technically, brands can opt out by adjusting settings in their merchants.google.com account. But the default is on. Google may even subscribe to your mailing list using a generic email address ([email protected]) unless you explicitly remove or ignore it. That’s not partnership, it’s data collection dressed as outreach.
This approach may seem like a win for exposure, but brand leaders need to look deeper. The audience receiving this content through Search or Maps didn’t sign up for it. They’re not qualified leads. There’s no interaction history, no context, no behavioral signal. Displaying curated email material to a cold audience raises the risk of misalignment, wrong message, wrong moment. For brands that rely heavily on segmented, behavior-driven communication, this undermines precision and performance.
More importantly, it erodes the perception of value among subscribers. When exclusive content is made publicly searchable, subscribers start questioning what makes signing up worth it. That weakens incentive, compresses your email list quality, and strains long-term loyalty. If customers see themselves as just another data point in a repurposed feed, the relationship changes, and not in your favor.
Executives should focus on this: when external platforms control the distribution of your owned content, trust becomes the cost. And once trust fades, retention and conversion follow quickly.
Gmail’s new email features conflict with the core principles of personalized email marketing
Over the past 15 years, email marketing has shifted from mass messaging to targeted communication. Segmentation, automation, and real-time personalization have turned the inbox into one of the most effective tools for relationship building. Gmail’s latest features, Automatic Extraction, Deal Cards, and Marketing Content Usage, ignore this evolution.
These systems reduce email content to surface-level information. Discounts, promo codes, expiration dates. That’s it. They treat every email as transactional, assuming the primary message is always the deal. But modern email strategy is built on layered content, personalized recommendations, loyalty messaging, product education. Those aren’t afterthoughts. They’re high-value touchpoints that create retention and trust over time. Stripping them out in favor of short, generic highlight blocks undermines the strategy.
This matters because customer behavior confirms it. For over a decade, industry surveys have shown that users prefer tailored messaging. They’re more likely to open, engage, and convert when they receive content that reflects their preferences or behavioral signals. Gmail’s one-size-fits-all feature rollout doesn’t just flatten messaging, it blocks marketers from deploying the very tactics that make email effective.
Marketing leaders should take note. Algorithms that prioritize simplified content may help Google streamline its inbox experience, but they don’t serve your long-term goals. The economics of email rely on relevance. Personalized messages have higher open rates, click-throughs, and revenue per send. When those messages are ignored or overwritten, performance drops.
It also shifts user expectations. If inboxes train recipients to expect only discount-driven messages, over time, they devalue all brand communications. That leads to disinterest, unsubscribes, or worse, spam complaints. The long-term impact isn’t just creative, it’s financial.
Executives building customer-centric strategies can’t afford to treat this as a UX change. It’s a strategic shift in how email is filtered, framed, and delivered. The cost is clarity, differentiation, and relevance, all core to performance-driven marketing.
Key highlights
- Loss of control limits strategic email impact: Gmail’s Automatic Extraction removes marketer-defined preview text, forcing brands to rely solely on subject lines. Leaders should re-evaluate subject line strategy and monitor how AI-driven formatting impacts message clarity and response rates.
- Uniform deal formatting reduces personalization value: Deal Annotations and Deal Cards shift focus to basic discount info, downplaying tailored messaging. Decision-makers should assess whether this undermines email segmentation efforts or leads to reduced engagement across secondary calls to action.
- Opt-in trust is at risk with public content repurposing: Marketing Content Usage redistributes subscriber-only content across Google platforms without proper context. Brands should review participation status and tighten data-sharing policies to protect exclusivity and maintain audience trust.
- Algorithmic simplification weakens email performance: Gmail’s approach favors generic messages over individualized content, diluting emotional engagement and loyalty-building. Leaders should safeguard personalization tactics and resist defaulting to one-size-fits-all campaigns to preserve long-term customer value.
