I thought site was hacked - but seems to have been Google

[Mr Lucky]

For years I have had an adsense ad in the sidebar. With no warning ads suddenly started appearing at the bottom of pages. I had a big fright: I assumed one of two things: site was hacked or human error (me having inadvertantly activated an old widget lurking around that code) But no.

The next day I got an email from Google:

Auto optimise is fully enabled in your account. This lets Google run experiments on your traffic to find ways to improve your revenue or user experience.
Good news. The recent experiments below showed positive results and we have applied these changes to your account.

So I went to the adsense site and yes, auto ads had been turned on for that site (Something I would never do as I tried years ago and it just looked awful)

So Googe had turned on Auto ads without so much as a by your leave.

Has anyone else noticed this? It seems to be very out of order to do that without permission.

 

[AndyB]

Same happened to me on one of my forums.

 

[beerForo]

Yes they do this. They did it to me years ago, but recently they ran an experiment w/o my permission. I was getting footer pop-ups and looked in adsense and an experiment was running for anchor ads.