Google Ads started writing your ads and picking your landing pages this month. The window to decline closed on September 1.

Most of the coverage of this ran in August, and all of it was written in the future tense. Prepare before September. Audit your campaigns ahead of the deadline. Get ready.

It is September 2. The window opened yesterday and runs to the end of the month. If you did nothing in August, you did not miss a warning so much as you were never going to see one, because the change arrives inside an advertising account most small business owners open twice a year, and Google’s notice of it lives on a blog for advertising professionals.

So this is the other article. Not how to prepare, but how to find out what happened and what to do about it now.

What is actually changing

Google’s own announcement is one sentence: “Campaigns using Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), automatically created assets (ACA) and campaign-level broad match setting will automatically be upgraded to AI Max.”

Two of those three are happening this month. The third was pushed back.

Campaign setting	Auto-upgrade window	Status
Automatically created assets (ACA)	September 2026	Happening now
Campaign-level broad match	September 2026	Happening now
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)	February 2027	Delayed

The DSA delay was announced on June 11, 2026. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, put it plainly: “We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear: you need more time to transition from Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to AI Max.” Google also restored the ability to create new DSA campaigns on June 15 after briefly removing it.

That delay is why a lot of people think they have until 2027. They do not. The DSA extension changed nothing about the other two, and the other two are the settings a small advertiser is far more likely to have on without having thought about it.

There is no opt-out during the window. The only way to decline was to turn off automatically created assets and the campaign-level broad match setting before September 1, which was Tuesday.

Whether this affects you comes down to two checkboxes

Campaign-level broad match is the setting Google describes as one that “enables Search campaigns to exclusively use broad match as the keyword match type. Enabling this setting will convert all existing phrase and exact match keywords into broad match and ensure all keywords added also use broad match.”

This is a deliberate choice. It is not on by default, and it only functions with a conversion-based Smart Bidding strategy. If you or your agency turned it on, you know, or your agency does. Important distinction: individual broad match keywords inside an ad group are not the same thing and are not affected. This is the campaign-wide switch.

Automatically created assets is the one that catches people. Google has since renamed it text customization, which is worth knowing because the setting you may have turned off two years ago under one name now appears in the interface under another. It generates extra headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads. Google’s description: it uses “a combination of extractive techniques and generative AI to generate assets that are more relevant to people’s search queries,” drawing from “your domain, landing page, existing ads, and keywords in your ad group.”

The reason this catches people is auto-apply recommendations. Google Ads has a feature that applies its own recommendations to your account on a rolling basis without asking each time, and automatically created assets has been among the recommendations it offers. Plenty of accounts have it on because nobody ever went to the Recommendations tab and looked at the auto-apply settings. If your account was set up by someone who has since moved on, or by a reseller as part of a package, this is a live possibility and it takes ninety seconds to check.

To check: Google Ads, the lightbulb icon in the left navigation, then the Auto-apply tab at the top. Every toggle there is something Google is allowed to change in your account without asking.

What AI Max turns on

AI Max is a bundle of three settings, and they are not independent of each other.

Search term matching. Google’s description is that it “automatically refines your targeting and creative delivery” using broad match plus what Google calls keywordless technology, learning from your keywords, creatives and URLs to match searches your keyword list would have missed. In practice, your keyword list stops being a boundary and becomes a hint.

Text customization. Generative and extractive AI writes additional headlines and descriptions, mixed in with the ones you wrote. Campaign level, on by default when AI Max is on.

Final URL expansion. This is the one worth reading twice. Google’s own wording: it will “send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your domain when it’s likely to result in better performance.” Your final URL becomes a suggestion. Google picks the landing page.

The dependency runs one way and it is a real constraint: Final URL expansion requires text customization. Turn text customization off and Final URL expansion turns off with it. Google’s help page states this outright, that “if Final URL expansion is enabled, disabling text customization also turns off that setting.” You cannot have Google choosing your landing pages while you keep writing all your own ad copy.

The line in Google’s documentation that should stop some businesses cold

Here it is, from Google’s own help page on how AI Max works:

When Final URL expansion is turned on for your campaign, pinned assets aren’t used if a more relevant URL is chosen, because they may not match the customer’s intent.

Google’s AI Max FAQ says the same thing more bluntly: when both text customization and Final URL expansion are enabled, “pinning of RSA assets will not be respected.”

Pinning is how you force a specific headline or description to appear in a specific position in every single ad. For most advertisers it is a preference. For some, it is the only reason the ad is legal.

If you are a clinic and your ads carry a required professional designation. If you are a law firm and there is language your regulator expects on the advertisement. If you are a financial services business with disclosure obligations. If you run promotional pricing and the conditions have to appear alongside the price. In all of those cases, someone pinned that text specifically so it could not be dropped, and Final URL expansion drops it.

Google publishes the fix in its own guidance: if pinning is a necessity, do not use Final URL expansion and do not use URL inclusions. That is a clear instruction, and it is sitting several clicks deep in a help centre nobody reads.

We have written before about what AODA actually requires of an Ontario business website and about building AI systems for Ontario clinics under PHIPA. This belongs in the same category of problem: a compliance obligation that lives in a checkbox somebody else is now allowed to change.

The second-order problem: Google picking your landing page

Final URL expansion assumes your website has good pages to choose from. For a large e-commerce catalogue, that assumption usually holds. Someone searches for a specific product, Google finds the product page, everyone wins.

For a typical small business site with fourteen pages, it holds much less well. The pages Google can now send paid traffic to include your About page, your careers page, an old blog post, a service page for a service you stopped offering, and a location page for the second location you closed last year. Every page on your domain that a crawler can see is a candidate landing page for traffic you are paying for.

You have a control here, and it is worth using: URL exclusions. In campaign Settings, under the AI Max section, “Add URL exclusions” under Final URL expansion, listing URLs to exclude or building rules. Note the odd requirement Google documents, that URL exclusions need text customization and Final URL expansion both turned on. The control only exists while the thing it controls is running.

The practical version of this: if Final URL expansion is on, spend twenty minutes listing every page on your site that should never receive an ad click, and exclude them. Careers. Privacy policy. Terms. Anything discontinued. Thank-you and confirmation pages, which are worse than useless because they can fire conversion tracking on people who never converted.

Google’s 7 percent, read carefully

Google’s performance claim for AI Max in the upgrade announcement reads:

AI Max for Search campaigns see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS when using the full feature suite, search term matching, text customization and final URL expansion, compared to using search term matching alone.

The footnote: “Google internal data, 2026; for non-Retail advertisers.”

Three things about that sentence deserve attention.

The baseline is not your current campaign. It is AI Max with only search term matching turned on. So the claim is not “AI Max beats what you have now by 7 percent.” It is “the full AI Max bundle beats a partial AI Max bundle by 7 percent.” Those are different statements and only one of them is being made.

It is Google internal data, unaudited, with no sample size, no confidence interval and no distribution. An average of 7 percent tells you nothing about how many advertisers went backwards.

And it excludes retail, which is the vertical where the independent testing has been most thorough and least flattering.

Google’s broader marketing has used a larger number, 14 percent more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS, for AI Max against not using it. Same caveats apply.

What the independent testing found

The largest public test comes from Smarter Ecommerce, published November 6, 2025. Mike Ryan, their Head of Ecommerce Insights, examined more than 250 retail campaigns and summarised it as: “I looked at over 250 campaigns and found it’s also the worst match type.” The headline figure was roughly 35 percent lower return on ad spend than traditional match types.

The same analysis found something else worth knowing, which is how little AI Max was actually being used. Across 600 or more accounts with active Search campaigns, AI Max was live in about 12 percent of them, and represented about 0.57 percent of account-level spend. Even inside campaigns where it was switched on, it accounted for around 5 percent of spend.

Separately, Xavier Mantica published a four-month test on the same day, with cost per conversion by match type:

Match type	Cost per conversion
Phrase match	$43.97
Exact match	$52.69
Exact match, close variants	$61.65
Phrase match, close variants	$97.67
AI Max	$100.37

His summary: “After 4 months of testing, the data is brutal.”

Two honest caveats, because we would rather you trust the next thing we tell you. Both tests are from November 2025, when AI Max was new, and the product has had ten months of development and several new controls since. And Smarter Ecommerce’s data is retail, which is exactly the vertical Google’s 7 percent claim excludes. That cuts both ways: Google chose to exclude the segment where the independent data is worst, and the independent data covers the segment Google chose to exclude.

Writing in Search Engine Land on June 9, 2026, Meriem Nacer catalogued a more current set of problems for brand campaigns specifically, citing work from Adalysis, DAC and others: competitor terms leaking through brand controls, unintended language matching, and relevance around 50 percent in some campaigns.

The cannibalisation problem is the one that will quietly distort your reporting. If you run a separate branded campaign, which most businesses that spend seriously on Google should, an AI Max campaign that expands into your brand terms will start buying clicks you were already getting cheaply, at a higher cost, and will book the conversions to itself. Your AI Max campaign looks like it is working. Your branded campaign looks like it is dying. Neither is true.

Google shipped a control for this. Brand controls inside AI Max, rolled out broadly from around June 1, 2026, offer three settings: show ads on all relevant searches, control branded searches with inclusions and exclusions, or show ads only on unbranded searches. It works off Google’s own index of brand entities rather than a list you maintain, which is a genuine improvement over manual negative keywords, since those never catch every misspelling. Google’s documentation says existing brand inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically into the AI Max configuration.

The trap in turning AI Max off

There is a real catch here, from Google’s own FAQ: “if your campaign is running brand exclusions and AI Max is turned off, brand exclusions will be disabled.”

Read that as an operational instruction. If you switch AI Max off to stop the query expansion, you also switch off the brand exclusions you configured to contain it. If you then switch AI Max back on later, check whether they came back.

The FAQ also confirms the reassuring half: “Negative keywords will be respected even with AI Max turned on.” Your negative keyword list survives. It is the single most valuable thing you own going into this month, and if yours is thin, building it out is the highest-return hour you can spend on the account right now.

The five reports that tell you what happened

Google did add reporting, and it is better than what Performance Max shipped with. Five places to look:

1. Search terms report. There is now an AI Max match type with a source column, so you can see which queries came in through expansion rather than your keywords. Note Google’s own documented limitation: “when filtering for match type = ‘AI Max’ the search terms report may show lower numbers for AI Max. This filter doesn’t consider ‘Other search terms’.” So the filtered view undercounts. Read the unfiltered report.
2. The combined view, listed as “Search terms and landing pages from AI Max,” which shows query, headline served and landing page together. This is the fastest way to see what Google actually did with a search.
3. Keywords report. Two aggregate rows to look for: “Total: AI Max expanded matches” and “Total: AI Max landing page matches.” The second one is traffic matched off your pages and assets rather than your keywords.
4. Landing pages report. There is a “Selected by” column. This is where you find out which of your pages Google decided to advertise.
5. Asset reports. AI-generated headlines and descriptions are marked “Google AI” in the “Added by” column. You can remove individual generated assets. Google notes you cannot remove them in bulk in the Google Ads interface, only through the API or Google Ads Editor, which is a meaningful annoyance if you are unhappy with a lot of them.

What to do this week

If you spend money on Google Search ads, an hour now is worth more than a post-mortem in October.

1. Establish whether you were in scope. Campaigns, Settings, look for the campaign-level broad match setting and for text customization, formerly automatically created assets. Then check the Auto-apply tab under Recommendations, because that is how the second one gets switched on without a decision.
2. Pull the search terms report for September 1 onward and read it unfiltered. You are looking for queries you would never have bid on. This is the fastest signal that expansion is costing you money.
3. If you pin ad copy for compliance, deal with this today. Confirm whether Final URL expansion is on. If it is, your pinned assets are not being used. Google’s guidance is to turn Final URL expansion off, and turning off text customization turns it off too.
4. Check the landing pages report’s “Selected by” column, then exclude every page that should never receive a paid click. Careers, policies, discontinued services, confirmation pages.
5. Set brand controls deliberately rather than accepting the default of showing ads on all relevant searches, particularly if you run a separate branded campaign. And if you turn AI Max off, verify your brand exclusions are still in place afterwards.
6. Compare cost per conversion against August, not against last September. You want the change attributable to this, not to seasonality.
7. Widen your negative keyword list. It still works, it is the control Google confirms it respects, and it is the one thing here that is entirely yours.
8. If you sell products, rule out the other September confound first. Google sunset the Content API for Shopping on August 18 and started returning progressive errors on September 1, so Shopping and Performance Max performance can move this month for a reason that has nothing to do with AI Max. Both changes landed in the same three weeks, which makes attribution genuinely hard unless you eliminate one of them. Checking your Merchant Center data sources takes four minutes and is described here. Do it before you conclude anything about AI Max from a shape change in ecommerce spend.

The pattern, which is the actual point

There is a version of this article that is just a Google Ads checklist, and it would be useful for the few hundred people it applies to. The more general observation is worth more.

Over the last two years, the platforms that small businesses depend on have been converting settings into defaults and defaults into automatic upgrades. Google changed the switch that controls whether AI can use your site’s content. Chrome is warning visitors about sites served over HTTP and dropping support for page cleanup code, both on hard dates. Microsoft’s default purchase path for Business Standard now includes Copilot. Each of these was announced properly. Each was covered. And in each case the affected business found out when something changed.

The through line is not that the platforms are acting in bad faith. It is that the announcement channel and the affected party have almost no overlap. Google announced this on a blog for advertising professionals in April, updated it in June, and the businesses it applies to are reading it now, in the past tense, in a post like this one.

The only durable defence is a short, boring list: every platform that can change something you rely on, and one person whose job it is to read that platform’s release notes once a month. Google Ads. Google Search Console. Your hosting provider. Your payment processor. Your booking system. Your email provider. Six links in a bookmarks folder and twenty minutes a month.

Most businesses we talk to do not have that list, and it is a shorter project than it sounds. If you want a hand building it, or you want someone to look at what happened in your ad account this month, get in touch.

Sources

• We’re upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max, Google, for the upgrade announcement wording, the campaign types in scope, the September and February timing, the removal of DSA creation, the 7 percent claim and its “Google internal data, 2026; for non-Retail advertisers” footnote, and the “Don’t wait for the automatic upgrades” recommendation
• How AI Max for Search campaigns works, Google Ads Help, for the descriptions of search term matching, text customization and Final URL expansion, the default states, the available controls, and the quoted sentence on pinned assets not being used when Final URL expansion is on
• Frequently asked questions about AI Max for Search campaigns, Google Ads Help, for “pinning of RSA assets will not be respected,” for “Negative keywords will be respected even with AI Max turned on,” and for the warning that brand exclusions are disabled when AI Max is turned off
• About Final URL expansion in Search, Google Ads Help, for the “most relevant URLs on your domain” wording, the default-on behaviour, and the URL exclusions procedure and its dependency on text customization
• Turn text customization on or off in Search campaigns, Google Ads Help, for the step-by-step settings path and for the note that disabling text customization also turns off Final URL expansion
• About text customization in Search campaigns, Google Ads Help, for the rename from automatically created assets and the description of how assets are generated
• About the broad match keywords campaign setting, Google Ads Help, for the exact definition of the campaign-level setting, the conversion-based Smart Bidding requirement, and the settings path
• About reporting in AI Max for Search campaigns, Google Ads Help, for the five reports, the “Selected by” and “Added by” columns, the aggregate keyword rows, the documented search terms filter limitation, and the bulk asset removal restriction
• About applying recommendations automatically, Google Ads Help, for how auto-apply recommendations work and where the settings live
• Google delays Dynamic Search Ads migration to AI Max, Search Engine Land, for the June 11, 2026 delay announcement, the Ginny Marvin quote, the June 15 restoration of DSA creation, and the confirmation that ACA and campaign-level broad match remained on the September schedule
• Google sets AI Max migration timeline for Search campaigns, Search Engine Land, for the consolidated migration timeline
• Independent tests show AI Max underperforms traditional match types, PPC Land, November 2025, for the Smarter Ecommerce analysis of 250-plus retail campaigns, the Mike Ryan quote, the 35 percent ROAS figure, the adoption figures across 600-plus accounts, and Xavier Mantica’s four-month cost-per-conversion table and quote
• Google Ads gets branded search controls inside AI Max, PPC Land, for the three brand control settings, the brand entity index mechanism, the rollout beginning around June 1, 2026, and the brand cannibalisation concern
• Why your brand campaign may not be ready for AI Max, Meriem Nacer, Search Engine Land, June 9, 2026, for the documented brand control failures and the prerequisites argument
• AI Max for Search: Everything you need to know, Search Engine Land, for the 14 percent figure and the early case study results