AI Max is not a new campaign type, which is the first thing worth getting straight. It is a set of three switches inside the Search campaigns you already have. Your campaigns keep their names, their budgets and their keywords. What changes is how far Google is allowed to go beyond them.
Through September 2026 Google switched it on automatically across a large number of accounts. If your campaign was using broad match set at campaign level, or Google's older automatically created assets, it was migrated during that month whether anybody in your business chose it or not. Dynamic Search Ads follow in February 2027.
So the useful question is not whether to try AI Max. In a lot of accounts it is already running. The question is whether you know it is, and whether the settings it arrived with are the ones you would have picked.
The three things it actually does
They are separate switches doing genuinely different jobs, which is why treating AI Max as one thing leads people astray.
- Search term matching lets Google show your ads for searches your keywords do not cover. It reads your website, your existing ads and your keywords, and decides for itself what counts as related. It is broad match with a wider remit.
- Text customisation lets Google write its own headlines and descriptions, pulling wording from your landing page and your existing ads. The ad somebody sees may not be an ad anyone at your company wrote.
- Final URL expansion lets Google send the click to whichever page of your site it decides fits the search better than the page you chose.
How to tell whether it is running in your account
- 1Open Google Ads, go to Campaigns, then Settings.
- 2Look for the AI Max section. If there is no such section, this campaign is not on it.
- 3Open it and note which of the three are switched on. Write it down rather than trusting your memory, because later you will want to know what Google set and what you chose.
- 4Then look at where your traffic is landing. If final URL expansion is on, people are arriving on pages you never pointed them at.
Go through my Google Ads campaigns and tell me, for each one, whether AI Max is on and which of search term matching, text customisation and final URL expansion are enabled. Then show me the search terms from the last thirty days that my keywords did not cover, and what each one cost me.The change most people miss
Final URL expansion quietly breaks any reporting built on landing page URLs. If you group performance by the page an ad pointed at, that link no longer holds, because the page served may not be the page configured. Nothing errors. The numbers simply stop meaning what they used to.
There is a second one. Your account now has two search term reports, the original and an AI Max one, and the same search term can appear in both. Add them together and you are double counting.
Our position, plainly
We run client accounts on Google every day and we are a Google Premier Partner, so this is not a reflexive suspicion of automation. Smart Bidding earns its place. Performance Max earns its place in the right account. AI Max is the same kind of tool and the same rule applies to it.
The rule is that Google's automation is only ever as good as the signal you have given it. In an account with thin conversion history, AI Max widens where your money goes before anything has established what works, and you pay for that education.
So if your account is not yet producing conversions steadily, or your conversion tracking has not been checked in the last year, leave all three off and get a clean signal first. As a rough line, thirty conversions a month is about the point at which Google's conversion based bidding has enough to learn from, and we use it here as a proxy rather than because Google publishes a threshold for AI Max. None of this is a permanent position. It is an order of operations.
When it is genuinely worth turning on
- You have a steady flow of conversions and tracking you have actually tested rather than assumed.
- You have a negative keyword list built from real search term data, because search term matching will go and find you the same rubbish your negatives were written to block.
- You have more than one landing page and they are all good. Final URL expansion is only an advantage if the page it picks is better than the page you picked.
- You can report on what AI Max brought in separately from what your keywords brought in. Without that you cannot judge it, and you will end up arguing about it on feel.
Turn on search term matching first, on its own, and watch the search terms for a fortnight before adding anything else. Switching all three on at once means you cannot tell which one did what.
The controls you still have
It is more controllable than it first appears, and most people never find these.
- Brand exclusions stop your ads showing against brands you do not want to appear next to. Campaign level.
- Brand inclusions do the opposite, tying your ads to brands you do want, and can be set at campaign or ad group level.
- Locations of interest let you reach people searching about a place rather than people sitting in it, set per ad group.
- URL exclusions stop particular pages being used as landing pages at all.
- URL inclusions bring in pages the expansion would otherwise never use.
- Text guidelines let you tell Google what it may and may not say, which matters most if you are regulated or have claims you cannot vary.
- Your negative keywords still apply. They are not overridden.
What is coming next
Dynamic Search Ads are the next to move. Google began notifying accounts in September 2026, with reminders in January 2027 and automatic migration through February 2027, after which new Dynamic Search Ad groups cannot be created at all. If you run them, that is the date to have a plan by.
The direction is not really in doubt. Google is steadily replacing settings you chose with systems that choose for you, and the useful response is not to fight that. It is to make sure the thing it is learning from is right, and to know which switches you still hold.