Two vendors now ship an "AI Max". One can switch on the other
Microsoft Advertising's Google Ads importer has a checkbox called UpdateAIMaxSettings. Microsoft's own API reference says it is enabled by default, and that you set it to false "to preserve existing Microsoft AI Max settings". On 1 September 2026 Google starts turning AI Max on by itself across a slice of Search campaigns. Those two facts live in different documents, and nobody has put them next to each other.
The import box. Microsoft Learn documents two options on the Google Ads importer — NewAIMaxSettings and UpdateAIMaxSettings — both enabled by default. The second one is the one you turn off to keep your own Microsoft settings. Scheduled imports can run daily.
The date. From 1 September 2026, Google Ads automatically upgrades Search campaigns using campaign-level broad match or standalone automatically created assets to AI Max, progressively through the month.
The defaults are not symmetrical. Search term matching stays on either way. Text customisation lands off if you came from broad match and on if you came from automatically created assets.
- Where the 1 September date is published, and the six documentation pages where it is not.
- What Microsoft shipped on 19 August, and which property said so.
- What disappears from new Microsoft campaigns on 1 October 2026.
Start with the checkbox, because it is the part that is documented, dull, and easy to miss. If you run Google Ads and mirror some of the spend into Microsoft Advertising, you almost certainly set up an import once and stopped thinking about it. That import has a page of options. Two of them are about AI Max.
A setting that crosses between two accounts
Microsoft's API reference for the GoogleImportOption object lists every switch the importer honours. The relevant entry reads, word for word: "Import updates to AI Max settings. This option is enabled by default, or effectively set to true. Set this element false to preserve existing Microsoft AI Max settings."
Read the last clause slowly. Turning the option off is what preserves your Microsoft-side settings — which means leaving it on is what lets the imported values replace them. Its twin, NewAIMaxSettings, imports AI Max settings that have not been imported before, and it is enabled by default too. The same reference gives the path in the interface: Import from Google Ads → Choose import options → Targeting → AI Max settings.
NewAIMaxSettings shows up in the March 2026 section of Microsoft's API release notes, listed next to NewPortfolioBidStrategy as a new option on GoogleImportOption — a month before Microsoft announced an AI Max of its own, which tells you what it was built to carry. UpdateAIMaxSettings is documented on the reference page but does not appear in the release notes we read.
Then there is the clock. Microsoft's guide to scheduled imports lists the frequencies: Auto, which the page describes as an option that "allows Microsoft Advertising to set an import schedule to best optimize your campaigns", plus Now, Once, Daily, Weekly and Monthly. A daily schedule keeps running "until you delete or pause the schedule on the Import schedule and history page".
So: a default-on checkbox, a recurring job, and — from 1 September — a set of Google-side values that are about to change on their own. Three documents, one sequence.
Two products, one name
Before going further it is worth pinning down which AI Max is which, because the rest of this page falls apart if they blur.
Google's AI Max is a bundle of three settings on Search campaigns: search term matching, text customisation, final URL expansion. Google's own help page, read on 21 August 2026, states that "New Search campaigns have the AI Max feature turned on by default", and that when you create one, "the option to optimize your campaign with AI Max will be selected by default".
Microsoft's AI Max is a bundle of three settings on Search campaigns with the same three names. It was announced on 21 April 2026, piloted from May, and made generally available on 19 August 2026. It runs on a different auction and different inventory — Bing, and conversational surfaces in Copilot.
When a colleague or an agency says "we've enabled AI Max", the useful follow-up is not what is it. It is which one, and did we choose it.
What Google's developer blog actually says
The source is not the advertiser help centre. It is a post on the Google Ads Developer Blog dated 12 August 2026, credited to Bob Hancock of the Google Ads API team. The load-bearing sentence: "On September 1, 2026, Google Ads will begin automatically upgrading Search campaigns using Campaign-level Broad Match (CB) or standalone Automatically Created Assets (ACA) to AI Max. The migration job will roll out progressively throughout the month."
Three things follow from that. The upgrade is automatic rather than offered. It touches two specific legacy configurations, not every Search campaign. And it is spread across thirty days, so an account can be untouched on 3 September and migrated by 22 September with nobody having done anything.
The same post carries the date that closed the back door: since 3 August 2026, creating new campaign-level broad match configurations or legacy automatically created assets is blocked in the interface, in Google Ads Editor, and across every version of the API. And it gives the two GAQL fields that tell you which campaigns have moved — campaign.aca_migration_date_time and campaign.broad_match_migration_date_time.
September is a crowded month on Google Ads in any case: language targeting changes in the same window. Dynamic Search Ads, meanwhile, are excluded from this phase. Their automigration was rescheduled to 1–28 February 2027, with in-account warning banners from September 2026 and a notification on 15 January 2027.
The defaults, path by path
This is the part most summaries skip, and it is the part that changes numbers. Google describes the migration as happening "in-place" to equivalent AI Max settings, to keep performance from swinging. Equivalent to what you had, though — so where you land depends on where you started.
| AI Max setting | Coming from campaign-level broad match | Coming from automatically created assets |
|---|---|---|
| Search term matching (STM) | On | On |
| Text customisation (TC) | Off | On |
| Final URL expansion (FUE) | Off | Off |
| Brand lists (inclusions and exclusions) | Preserved and moved in-place | Not mentioned for this path |
The second row is the one to read twice. If your campaign uses automatically created assets, text customisation arrives switched on — the system may compose variants of your headlines and descriptions. For a regulated business, or one with a house vocabulary it has spent years enforcing, that single row is a reason to review ad copy before 1 September rather than after.
The last row deserves the opposite kind of attention. Google says brand inclusions and exclusions are preserved on the broad match path. The equivalent sentence does not appear for the assets path. That is not evidence they are dropped — it is evidence the document is silent, which is a reason to check the field by hand rather than assume either way.
19 August, and the pages that don't mention it
On 19 August 2026 Microsoft Advertising made AI Max generally available across accounts, globally, for Search campaigns. Brand inclusions and exclusions shipped with it, along with term exclusions for generated text and URL rules that limit where final URL expansion can send a click. Two existing features — predictive matching and autogenerated text assets — move under the AI Max banner, so campaigns already using either find the matching AI Max setting switched on; the remaining features are opt-in.
The chain of source matters here, so we will state it plainly rather than smooth it over. The announcement was a LinkedIn post by Navah Hopkins, Microsoft's advertising liaison, reported on 19 and 20 August by Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and PPC Land. We could not open the post itself without an account. For this item our source is those three reports, not a Microsoft document.
Which raised the obvious question, so we went and counted. On 21 August 2026 we opened the official pages with a real browser — a plain HTTP client returns a shell on several of them — and counted occurrences in the visible text only.
| Page | "AI Max" | Control term |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Advertising blog (en) | 0 | "Copilot" 6, "Clarity" 2 |
| Microsoft Advertising API release notes | 0 | "Performance Max" 2, "May 2026" 3 |
| Google, "Set up AI Max" (en / it / ro) | 79 / 79 / 79 | "September" 0 in all three |
| Google, "How AI Max works" (en / it / ro) | 70 / 70 / 70 | "September" 0 in all three |
The last two rows are the finding. The two pages Google points advertisers at name the product roughly eighty times each, with identical counts in English, Italian and Romanian — and contain the word "September" zero times in any of them. The migration date lives on the developer blog, which is the one property an advertiser never opens.
On the Microsoft side, the English blog index stops at a 12 August 2026 post about Microsoft Clarity and does not mention AI Max. Opening the Italian blog address on 21 August 2026 lands on the Microsoft Advertising homepage rather than a list of posts. The API release notes' most recent section is May 2026, so their silence proves little — that page is not monthly.
Microsoft's help centre search is rendered at runtime. Searching for "budget" — a word that must be in there — returns two occurrences in the visible text and no readable results. When the control fails, the count is worthless, so we claim nothing about that property.
Max CPC leaves new campaigns on 1 October
A second Microsoft change landed in the same week, reported by Search Engine Journal on 20 August 2026. From 1 October 2026, Max CPC will no longer be available when creating new non-portfolio campaigns using Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value or Maximize Clicks.
Campaigns created before that date keep the setting. Portfolio bid strategies are unaffected, as are Target Impression Share and Enhanced CPC. The removal starts in the interface; timing for Microsoft Advertising Editor has not been announced and the API change is expected later. Microsoft's stated reasoning is that a manual ceiling can interfere with automated bidding, particularly when it sits above a campaign's average CPC.
We could not find a Microsoft-authored page announcing this either, on the properties we were able to measure. The same caveat applies: the help centre is outside what our method can read.
What our own Search Console shows
We published our analysis of the September migration on 9 August 2026, in three languages. Querying the cittago.com property on 20 August 2026 over a 28-day window produced a split we did not expect.
| Version | Impressions | Clicks | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | 109 | 0 | 9.8 |
| Italian | 20 | 5 | 4.0 |
| Romanian | 1 | 0 | 2.0 |
The English page collected five and a half times the impressions of the Italian one and converted none of them. The Italian page, on twenty impressions, took five clicks. Twenty impressions is not a trend and we will not pretend otherwise — but the shape is consistent with what we keep seeing: broad English demand that browses, narrow non-English demand that arrives already knowing what it wants.
The smaller detail is the more interesting one. Three of the queries that reached the English page in that window are pasted report rows — strings of the form "total: ai max expanded matches" followed by columns of figures, in three different currencies (CAD, EUR and GBP). Four impressions between them, no clicks. That is not market data. It is evidence that an "AI Max expanded matches" line is already showing up in someone's reporting, and that they are pasting it into a search engine to find out what it is.
If that row turns up in your account and you cannot trace it, the place to look is not the report — it is the setting. Checking three boxes across two platforms during a thirty-day rolling migration is unglamorous and it is exactly the kind of month where having someone managing your Google Ads campaigns earns its keep. If you have no one doing it, the work still happens: the platform does it for you.
What these documents do not say
- They do not say the import will switch AI Max on in Microsoft. They say the option that imports those settings is on by default. We have not run an import after a September migration and watched what happens.
- They do not say how many campaigns are affected. Google has published no figures, and we have no sample that would let us estimate honestly.
- They do not say AI Max performs better or worse. This page is about what changes and when, not about return. Uplift percentages in circulation come from platform materials.
- They do not offer an opt-out from the September migration itself. Google describes it as automatic and progressive. What stays yours is the individual settings afterwards.
- We did not read Microsoft's original announcement. Three trade reports citing one LinkedIn post is the whole chain for the 19 August item.
The words, in a table
| Term | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Campaign-level broad match (CB) | A setting that made every keyword in a campaign broad in one move. No new ones can be created since 3 August 2026. |
| Automatically created assets (ACA) | Headlines and descriptions Google generated from your site and existing ads, in the pre-AI-Max form. |
| Search term matching (STM) | Serves your ad on searches outside your keyword list, using the site, the ads and inferred intent. On after either migration path. |
| Text customisation (TC) | The system writes variants of your headlines and descriptions. On after migration if you came from ACA. |
| Final URL expansion (FUE) | A click can land on a page other than the one you set, if the system judges it a better match. Off after migration on both paths. |
| Non-portfolio campaign | A campaign with its own bid strategy rather than one shared across campaigns. This is the category losing Max CPC on Microsoft from 1 October 2026. |
| Scheduled import | Automatic copying of campaigns from Google Ads into Microsoft Advertising, on an Auto, daily, weekly or monthly cadence. |
Where you stand, in three thresholds
First threshold — largely not your problem. No Search campaigns on campaign-level broad match or standalone automatically created assets, and no linked Microsoft account. September passes you by. The one thing to carry forward is that new Search campaigns are created with AI Max on by default, so the next one you build starts there.
Second threshold — Google only. At least one campaign sits on one of the two paths. Before 1 September 2026, two things are worth an hour: your ad copy, if you came from automatically created assets, because text customisation will be on; and your brand exclusion lists in every case, since the documentation only promises to preserve them on one of the two paths. Afterwards, the two GAQL fields tell you which campaigns moved and when.
Third threshold — both platforms. Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and a live scheduled import between them. One check, one place: Import from Google Ads → Choose import options → Targeting → AI Max settings. Look at how that box is set today, and decide deliberately — before the calendar decides.
Questions nobody has actually asked us
No client has asked us any of this. The Microsoft launch is dated 19 August 2026 and Google's developer post 12 August 2026, so these are questions we put to the documents rather than questions anyone put to us.
Last updated: 21 August 2026. The Google Ads Developer Blog post "Migrate Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets to AI Max" is dated 12 August 2026, credited to Bob Hancock, and was read in full on this date with a real browser; the English quotations and the defaults table are reproduced from that text. Google's two AI Max help pages were read the same day in their English, Italian and Romanian versions, and the counts were taken on visible text only, with page markup excluded. The UpdateAIMaxSettings wording comes from the GoogleImportOption reference on Microsoft Learn, which declares itself updated on 11 August 2026; NewAIMaxSettings appears in the March 2026 section of the Microsoft Advertising API release notes, while UpdateAIMaxSettings is documented only on the reference page. Import scheduling options come from Microsoft's scheduled-imports guide. For the 19 August 2026 Microsoft launch our sources are reports by Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and PPC Land, all citing a LinkedIn post by Navah Hopkins that we could not open; the 1 October 2026 Max CPC change comes from Search Engine Journal, 20 August 2026. Microsoft's help centre was not measured because the control check failed on it. Our Search Console figures are for the cittago.com property, 28-day window queried on 20 August 2026. We will update this page when Google publishes the date on its advertiser help pages, when Microsoft publishes a page of its own about AI Max, or once we have observed import behaviour after a real migration.
Sources: Google Ads Developer Blog — Migrate Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets to AI Max (12 August 2026) · Google Ads Help — Set up AI Max for Search campaigns · Microsoft Learn — GoogleImportOption Data Object · Microsoft Learn — Edit your scheduled imports and review import history and results · Search Engine Journal — Microsoft Advertising Rolls Out AI Max Globally (19 August 2026) · Search Engine Journal — Microsoft Ads Is Removing Max CPC From New Campaigns (20 August 2026)
