Google moved your campaigns to AI Max

What Google switched on

AI Max is a set of automatic features on top of a normal Search campaign. Search term matching lets Google show ads on queries beyond your keywords. With text customisation Google rewrites your headlines and descriptions itself. Final URL expansion lets Google pick which page of your site the click lands on. After the upgrade all three are on by default.

The move of Dynamic Search Ads was pushed back by five months, to February 2027, after advertisers complained. Google announced that on the Google Ads Developer Blog. Campaigns with automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match were not given that delay.

Any Google automation is a trip to the casino

I have said it about AI Mode and I will say it again. Every automatic feature Google offers is a lottery. It is like going to a casino. You might win big, or you might lose everything you brought.

That is why campaigns should be set up by hand. Not by a neural network either, it makes mistakes too. You can use one to help, but check every setting yourself. If you want a predictable result, manual work is the only way to get one. It will never be one hundred per cent predictable, the system still behaves the way it behaves, but at least you know what you set.

What breaks first after the upgrade

All of your settings. You built the campaign for something specific, and now ads start showing wherever the system likes.

One of our 3D printer campaigns shows ads only for printers of particular brands, on queries from people ready to buy a particular model. The plain phrase 3D printer is excluded on purpose, because people searching that mostly want information. Search term matching does not care. It starts pouring informational traffic into the campaign as if that were the whole point.

Should you keep final URL expansion?

Our rule is simple. The more you fill in by hand, the better the campaign works. Keywords written for each ad group, a specific page for each ad, nothing thrown in at random. Final URL expansion does the opposite and hands the choice of page to Google.

If every ad group already has its own landing page, turn the expansion off. If you keep it, add URL exclusions for pages that should never get ad traffic, such as the blog, jobs and terms.

Should you believe the 7 per cent?

Google says advertisers get an average of 7 per cent more conversions with the full AI Max feature set, compared with search term matching alone. At launch in 2025 the number was 14 per cent. I am sure it is a number pulled out of thin air.

Right now the market is full of firms selling AI that runs your ads and brings you leads. It is mostly hot air. AI does not understand your target audience. It does not know what your customers are afraid of or what hurts them. It may hit the target and it may not. Even when it does, a plus 7 per cent can show up in the metrics and nowhere in sales.

Complaints like this are not new

When I worked in Google Ads support, automatic upgrades like this did not exist yet. There was AdWords Express, and we got plenty of requests along the lines of "please help me turn this Express thing off". We helped, and it could be switched off. Today the change happens on Google's side, so it is up to you to notice it.

The 30-minute check

This is what we go through in every account we take on now.

• Open the change history for September and October and look for changes made by Google. That shows which campaigns were upgraded.
• In each upgraded campaign, look at the AI Max settings and decide on search term matching, text customisation and final URL expansion one by one.
• Open the search terms report from the date of the upgrade. Informational and off-topic queries go into negative keywords.
• Check that brand and URL exclusions are in place if you keep any of the automatic features.
• Compare cost per real lead before and after the upgrade, not just the number of conversions. We explain why in our article on Quality Score and in Google Ads for small business.