Turn off Meta AI enhancements: an audit checklist for every Advantage+ creative toggle

The worst ad edit I have seen ship was made by nobody. A promo ad went out with a hard deadline in the primary text, and somewhere in delivery Meta's text enhancements smoothed the copy into a friendlier sentence that no longer carried the deadline. People kept claiming the offer the following week. Support honored it, because the screenshot they were sent was real. The discount came straight off the margin, and not one person on the buying side had touched the ad.

That is what Meta's AI enhancements do when they run unaudited. Advantage+ creative is a bundle of automatic edits that Meta applies to your ads in delivery: rewritten text, image overlays, generative image expansion, music, animation, extra links. Some of these are harmless. A few are dangerous for any ad where the exact wording is the offer. This is the audit I now run on every account I work in.

The takeaways

• Meta's enhancements are opt-out, and the defaults keep moving. New ads start from account defaults, duplicated ads can re-inherit enhancements you switched off, and Meta ships newly launched enhancement types in the on position. Audit per ad, at launch and after every edit.
• Three toggles can change what your ad promises: text enhancements (which rewrite or re-pair your copy), overlays (which can stamp a stale price onto the image), and image expansion (generative fill). All three go off on any offer-sensitive ad.
• A toggle that shows "off" is an intention, and the delivered ad is the evidence. Check your own page in the Meta Ad Library weekly and preview every placement after every edit, because that is where the rewritten deadline shows up.

What are Meta AI enhancements and why do they change your ads?

Meta AI enhancements, grouped in Ads Manager under Advantage+ creative, are automatic modifications Meta applies to your ad at delivery time: rewriting or re-pairing text, adding image overlays, expanding images with generative fill, animating statics, adding music, appending catalog items or extra site links. Meta's help center frames them as per-person, per-placement variations that should lift performance.

The framing is fine for a brand awareness ad. It breaks down for direct response, where the copy is a commitment: a price, a deadline, a regulated claim, a guarantee. An enhancement that "improves" that sentence can quietly change what you are legally and commercially promising, and you will not see it in your own feed because variations are assembled per impression.

This is also a different failure mode from your own automation misfiring. I covered the mistakes buyers make with their own automated rules separately: rules act on metrics you chose, with thresholds you wrote. Enhancements act on the creative itself, on Meta's judgment, with no readable log of what was changed for whom.

How do you turn off Meta AI enhancements in Ads Manager?

At the ad level: open the ad in Ads Manager, scroll to the Advantage+ creative section, click the edit control next to the enhancements summary, and switch off each enhancement individually, then publish. There is no single master kill switch that covers a whole campaign; the settings live per ad, so the audit lives per ad too.

Two complications to know before you start. First, the list of toggles you see depends on your objective, the ad format, and which rollout wave your account is in, so two accounts rarely show the identical panel. Second, Meta has been moving these controls gradually toward account-level defaults; some ad accounts can now set default enhancement behavior in the account settings. If yours has that control, set the defaults to off so new ads start clean. Then verify at the ad level anyway, because defaults govern new ads and tell you nothing about the ones already running.

The audit checklist: what each enhancement does and when to switch it off

The names below shift as Meta renames features, so audit by what the toggle says it does. These are the 10 families I check, ordered by how much damage they can do.

Switch off for any offer-sensitive ad:

1. Text enhancements (text improvements, text generation, text variations). Rewrites, shortens, or re-pairs your primary text, headlines, and descriptions, and can generate new variants. This is the one that deletes deadlines and reshapes terms. Off on every ad where the wording carries a price, a date, or a claim a regulator could read.
2. Add overlays. Stamps text or price labels onto your image, often pulled from a catalog feed. If the feed price and the ad price ever disagree, the overlay wins in the user's screenshot. Off for non-catalog ads; for catalog ads, only on if the feed is audited as rigorously as the ads.
3. Image expansion. Generative fill that extends your image to fit more placements, typically stretching a 1:1 square into a 9:16 vertical for Stories and Reels. It invents pixels: stretched products, warped logos, odd limbs. Off for product shots and anything with a human in frame.
4. Visual touch-ups. Automatic cropping and framing adjustments. The risk is what falls outside the new crop: disclaimers, the product, the offer text baked into the image. Off whenever the image carries required text.
5. Site links. Adds extra links under your ad pointing to other pages on your site. Traffic bypasses the landing page you are testing, which contaminates every funnel number downstream. Off during any test you intend to read.
6. Translate text. Machine translation of your copy for other-language audiences. Useful in theory, but offer terms and legal phrasing are exactly what machine translation gets subtly wrong. Off for regulated or deadline-driven offers.

Decide deliberately, default to off:

7. Music, 3D animation, image animation. Motion and audio added to static creative. Not dangerous to the offer, but it replaces your creative judgment with a template effect. If motion helps, build it as its own tested creative.
8. Relevant comments. Highlights existing comments beneath the ad. Fine with tight comment moderation; risky without it, because you are promoting whatever got engagement.
9. Add catalog items, CTA enhancements. Appends products or swaps the call-to-action pairing. Off for single-offer ads where one product and one action are the entire point.

Usually fine to leave on:

10. Brightness and contrast adjustments, standard placement adaptation. Mild image corrections and aspect-ratio fitting. I leave these on and check the placement previews once.

Why is the enhancement back on after you turned it off?

Because the off state does not travel. Four patterns account for nearly every case I have investigated. New ads are born with the current defaults, regardless of what you set on the last ad. Duplicating an ad or campaign can re-apply default enhancements in some creation flows. Meta introduces new enhancement types over time, and a new toggle arrives in the on position, which means an audit from March says nothing about a feature added in May. And certain streamlined campaign types bundle enhancements with fewer individual controls than the standard flow.

There is a fifth pattern that deserves its own line: delivery lag. I have seen ads still serving an enhanced variant after the toggle was switched off, presumably while the change propagated. Whether that is caching or a bug makes no difference to the customer holding the screenshot. It just means the settings panel can never be your only check.

Check the delivered ad, not the settings panel

The verification habit takes 10 minutes a week and has paid for itself many times over:

• Weekly Ad Library pass. Open your own page in the Meta Ad Library and look at every live ad. This shows versions as they are shown to people, outside your account's preview bubble.
• Placement previews after every publish and every edit. Edits are the moment defaults sneak back in, so re-check the previews after each edit just as you do at launch.
• A screenshot trail. Date-stamped screenshots of the enhancements panel and of the delivered ad. When support escalates a customer complaint about wording you never wrote, this trail settles it in minutes.

If an enhanced variant is live and the numbers are sliding, treat it like any other underperformer and apply the same discipline you would use when deciding to kill an ad: check the context before you blame the creative.

Automation you can audit

I am not against automation in ad accounts. I built an automation layer myself, in Adscalr, and the rule I held it to was simple: every evaluation gets logged and every kill is reversible for 24 hours, because automation without an audit trail is exactly how the deleted-deadline story happens. That standard is what Meta's creative enhancements currently lack, so this checklist is you building the audit trail by hand. If you want to see what accountable ad automation looks like when the trail is built in, the automation page walks through it.