If you run Google Search ads and haven’t logged in since August, something changed underneath you.
Through September, Google automatically upgraded campaigns using the campaign-level broad match setting and automatically created assets into AI Max. Not opt-in. The ability to create new ones was already switched off in early August, across the interface, the editor and the API.
Google says campaigns were migrated in place using equivalent settings, and that brand inclusions and exclusions carried over. That’s reassuring until your numbers move and you have nothing to compare against.
What AI Max actually is
It’s Google’s AI-driven layer for Search campaigns, and it bundles three things: search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion.
Put plainly, it has more latitude than the settings it replaced. It can match a wider range of searches, adjust your ad text, and send traffic to a page on your site other than the one you specified.
Alongside that it adds controls Google describes as more precise, including brand and location controls. So it’s not simply looser. It’s looser in some directions and tighter in others, which is exactly the kind of change that’s hard to read from a results graph.
Final URL expansion is the one to understand properly, because it is the least intuitive. You set a landing page. The system may decide another page on your site answers the search better and send the click there instead. For a business with one service page that rarely matters. For one with fifteen service pages and fifteen towns, it matters a great deal, and it means your site’s internal structure is now part of your ad targeting.
What to check now that it’s done
Compare before and after. Pull performance for August against September so far. You want cost per lead, conversion volume and which search terms triggered your ads. If the search terms look broader than they used to, that’s final URL expansion and search term matching doing their job.
Look at where traffic is landing. Final URL expansion can send clicks to pages you didn’t nominate. Sometimes that’s better. Sometimes a customer searching for emergency service lands on your about page. Check which pages are receiving paid traffic and whether they’re built to convert, which is the argument in why minimalist, conversion-focused design wins.
Read your live ad text. Text customization means the words being shown may not be the words you wrote. Worth knowing before a customer quotes your ad back to you.
This matters more than it sounds for regulated or specific trades. If you are licensed, bonded or certified, and the system paraphrases around that, you can end up with an ad that implies something slightly different from what you actually offer. Check the versions being served rather than the ones you typed.
Confirm your brand controls carried over. Google says exclusions came across. Verify rather than assume, especially if you were excluding competitor terms or your own brand.
If the comparison looks worse, resist the urge to tear the campaign down. You are looking at a system in a fresh learning period, and a rebuild restarts that clock. Give it one or two conversion cycles, then adjust the controls you still have: brand and location settings, negative keywords, and which pages you would rather traffic did not land on.
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Dynamic Search Ads were originally set to auto-upgrade from September too. Google extended that: the DSA sunset and auto-upgrade now begin in February 2027.
If you run DSA, you have roughly four months, and Google’s own recommendation is to move sooner rather than wait, on the grounds that transitioning yourself keeps control over the setup. That’s advice with an interest attached, but the logic holds. A migration you run is one where you choose the settings.
What this is part of
Zoom out and the pattern is consistent: fewer manual levers, more automated decisions, with your inputs shifting from settings to signals.
Which raises the stakes on the things you still control. Your conversion tracking, because automated bidding optimizes toward whatever you tell it counts. Your landing pages, because the system decides more about who arrives and less about what happens next. And your budget discipline, because automation spends more confidently than you would.
If your tracking is shaky, this is the change that exposes it. It is also the same pattern as Google dropping language targeting: a control you used to set by hand becomes something the system decides, and the only defence is knowing what your numbers looked like beforehand.
If your Search performance shifted in September and you’ve been looking for what broke, this is the first place to look. It wasn’t you.
Frequently asked questions
Could I have opted out?
No opt-out was published for the September upgrades. Creating new broad match and automatically created asset campaigns was already blocked in early August.
Did my settings survive?
Google says campaigns were migrated in place with equivalent settings and that brand inclusions and exclusions carried over. Verify it rather than trusting it.
Should I turn on the AI Max features I’m not using?
Google recommends enabling all of them and testing with its one-click experiments. Sensible advice, worth taking as an experiment rather than a default, and worth running when you have enough conversion volume to read the result.
What happens to Dynamic Search Ads?
Auto-upgrade and sunset begin in February 2027, extended from the original timeline. Google recommends moving before then.
