Google Ads turns on AI Max from 1 September 2026
Google has documented this migration in three places on its own domain. All three say „starting in September 2026”. The one thing none of them says is the day — that came in an email on 5 August, and it says the first.
What is happening. Search campaigns that use automatically created assets, or the campaign-level broad match setting, are being upgraded to AI Max. Google's help pages and its ads blog all put it in September 2026. An email sent to advertisers on 5 August names 1 September as the start.
Who can stop reading. If you run no Search campaigns — only Performance Max, Shopping or video — nothing in this migration touches you. Close the tab.
Why it is worth twenty minutes. Because both settings are switched on in plenty of accounts that never decided to switch them on, and because the consequence is not a new checkbox. It is a change in which searches trigger your ads.
- The two settings, and where they sit in the account — three clicks each.
- Why the two cases do not get the same defaults, a distinction most write-ups drop.
- The two ways to keep the choice, given that no opt-out button exists.
- What happened in an account we manage when matching got looser — including the part of the spend Google will not itemise.
If you landed here looking for what changes in Google Ads on 1 September 2026, the answer fits in one sentence: Search campaigns with either of two legacy settings switched on — automatically created assets, or campaign-level broad match — get upgraded to AI Max automatically. Nobody is asked.
The rest of this page is about the difference between what is confirmed and what is merely circulating, because on this particular migration those two things are not the same, and the gap matters if you are planning around a date.
We have run Google Ads accounts since it was called AdWords, in 2011, and Google Ads management is the service we do most often. What follows is what we wrote to our own clients this week.
What Google documents, and what it does not
Start here, because it is the part most coverage gets slightly wrong in both directions.
The migration itself is confirmed by Google, on Google's own domain, in three separate places. The help page on the broad match campaign setting: „starting in September 2026, campaigns using campaign-level broad match setting will automatically be upgraded to AI Max”. The help page on text customization says the same for the other feature: „starting in September 2026, campaigns using text customization, formerly known as automatically created assets, will automatically be upgraded to AI Max”. And the post on Google's ads blog confirms it a third time: „campaigns using Automatically Created Assets (ACA) and campaign-level broad match setting will continue to be auto-upgraded starting in September 2026”.
What none of the three gives you is the day. All say „starting in September 2026”. The 1 September date comes from an email the Google Ads team sent advertisers on 5 August 2026, subject line „automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting will be upgraded to AI Max”. We read about it in ppc.land's 7 August write-up, which quotes the subject line and sets out what gets enabled in each case, and in Search Engine Roundtable's note the same day.
Practically: plan for 1 September, but treat the month as the firm commitment, not the day. Google also tells you how you will find out your turn has come — „look for a pop-up banner in your Google Ads UI to upgrade to AI Max”. If that banner shows up in late August, you have your answer.
One vocabulary note so the documentation does not trip you up: Google has renamed automatically created assets to text customization. The help page treats them as the same thing, with the old name in brackets.
What changes on 1 September 2026
Two legacy features. Either one on its own is enough to put a campaign on the list.
Automatically created assets (ACA) is the setting that lets Google write extra headlines and descriptions for your ad, drawing on the landing page and the copy you already wrote. It started as an option and then became a default tick on new campaigns.
The campaign-level broad match setting is not the same as using broad match keywords. It is the switch that says „treat every keyword in this campaign as broad”, regardless of how you actually wrote them in the keyword list.
What you get on 1 September depends on which one you have, and the difference is real:
- You have automatically created assets → the campaign moves to AI Max with search term matching and text customization both on.
- You have campaign-level broad match → the campaign moves to AI Max with search term matching only. No text customization, no final URL expansion.
Google says the rollout is built to preserve current campaign behaviour as closely as possible, by applying the AI Max settings that mirror your existing configuration. That is technically accurate. It does not mean nothing changes — it means Google picks the nearest equivalent on your behalf.
1 September 2026 is when the automatic upgrades begin. It is not a day on which a button is pressed for everyone at once — it is the date the process starts. What you do before it counts; what you do after is a correction.
What AI Max is
AI Max is an optional bundle of features for Google Ads Search campaigns, through which Google widens search matching on its own, rewrites the ad copy, and can send traffic to pages other than the one you chose.
The bundle has three parts, and the September migration does not bring all of them:
- Search term matching — your ad shows on searches your keyword list does not cover, if Google judges them relevant to the business.
- Text customization — headlines and descriptions get rewritten based on the query and the page content.
- Final URL expansion — Google can send the visitor to a different page on your site than the one in the ad.
The official figure Google publishes: Search campaigns on AI Max see, on average, 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS when using the full suite — search term matching, text customization and final URL expansion — compared with using search term matching alone. The comparison point matters: it is not 7% against a campaign without AI Max, it is the full suite against one feature from it. It is Google's average, on Google's accounts, reported by Google.
Before and after, in a table
| What the campaign has | Until 31 August | From September |
|---|---|---|
| Automatically created assets | Google adds headlines and descriptions; the rest of the campaign stays as you built it | AI Max, with search term matching and text customization |
| Campaign-level broad match | Every keyword treated as broad | AI Max, with search term matching only |
| Both | The two features, separately | AI Max with both settings from the first row |
| Dynamic Search Ads | DSA | Still DSA — that migration was pushed to February 2027 |
| Opt-out button | — | None. Two ways around it, below |
No opt-out: the two ways to choose for yourself
There is no opt-out in the usual sense — no „no thanks” box appears. Google's own communication does say explicitly that the automatic upgrades can be avoided, in two ways:
- Turn the legacy feature off before September. No automatically created assets and no campaign-level broad match means you are not on the list. Mind what you give up: switching off campaign-level broad match returns your keywords to the match types you actually wrote, and volume can drop visibly.
- Turn AI Max on yourself, manually. Counter-intuitive, but it is what we recommend in most of the accounts we touch: if you are going there anyway, go there with settings you picked, on a day you are looking at the account, rather than on a September morning when you find out from a report.
The second is also the only one that gives you a clean measurement. Turn AI Max on for a single campaign, leave the rest untouched, and in two weeks you have a comparison inside the same account, over the same period, on the same market. That beats any published average.
If you are going there anyway, better to arrive on a day you are looking, with settings you chose.
What AI Max does not do
This list is as useful as the one above, because it cuts out half of the panic circulating in groups.
- It does not turn your campaign into Performance Max. It stays a Search campaign, on the search network. Two different things with different levels of control — we wrote about the other one in the piece on Performance Max.
- It does not change your budget. The daily amount stays where you set it.
- It does not change your bidding strategy. On maximise conversions, you stay there. On the August bidding change, see the target CPA piece.
- It does not bring text customization to the broad match case. Only the ACA case gets copy rewriting. This distinction goes missing in most coverage.
- It does not touch Dynamic Search Ads. Those have their own deadline, in February 2027.
- It does not delete your negative keywords. They stay and they keep working. They are, in fact, your main defence after the migration.
What to check in the account today
Under twenty minutes, and nothing special required.
- Google Ads access with admin or standard edit rights. Read-only lets you see the settings but not change them.
- The list of Search campaigns. Performance Max, Shopping, Display, Demand Gen and video are not in scope.
- Each Search campaign's settings — that is where the campaign-level broad match switch lives.
- Each campaign's assets tab — that is where you see whether automatically created assets are on.
- A search terms export for the last 30 days. This is your baseline: if something shifts in September, you want to know what it looked like before.
The last one is the one everybody skips and the only one that cannot be done retroactively. A search terms export downloaded on 30 August is worth more in October than any article about AI Max.
If you have several accounts under a Manager account, check all of them. We have seen small accounts running on a few hundred a month where both features had been on since the day the campaign was built and nobody had looked since.
What we measured when matching got looser
Here is our own part, with its limits stated first.
On 25 July 2026 we launched a Search campaign for a client — local services, two provinces in northern Italy. At setup we deliberately turned AI Max off, all three components. Not out of an opinion about artificial intelligence: it is a service people buy after reading one specific page, and we wanted the ad copy and the landing page to stay exactly as written, not as variants.
The campaign ran five days, 27 to 31 July, on generic keywords in phrase match. Not broad, not AI Max — phrase, the step before either of them. What came out:
| Metric, 27–31 July 2026 | Value |
|---|---|
| Clicks | 36 |
| Total cost | €92.82 |
| Conversions | 0 |
| Cost against visible search terms | €41.58 |
| Of which, outside the target area | €35.65 (86%) |
| Milan area alone | €27.97 (67% of the visible) |
| Cost per click, outside the area | €3.00–13.50 |
| Cost per click, inside the area | €0.29–1.72 |
| Budget in „other search terms”, which Google does not itemise | €51.24 (55%) |
One account, five days, figures read from that account's search terms report on 31 July 2026. The visible and hidden amounts sum to the total cost. The client is not named, with their agreement.
Two things in that table are worth pulling out.
First: nine out of nine out-of-area clicks came through phrase match. Zero through exact. And radius targeting could not have stopped any of it, because the person was physically inside the radius — Milan is fifty kilometres from Novara. They were simply searching about another city.
Second: 55% of the budget went into „other search terms”, the row Google reports as a total without telling you what was searched. The looser the matching, the bigger that row gets. That is the difference a business owner actually feels: not in a quality score, but in how much money goes somewhere you cannot even look at.
This has to be said plainly or the article is lying: the measurement is not about AI Max. It is about phrase match, which is tighter than broad, which is in turn tighter than AI Max's search term matching. What it shows is direction, not magnitude. Every step of loosening moves money from searches you chose towards searches Google chooses. How much, in your account, nobody can say without measuring in your account.
Why small budgets feel it first
An account spending twenty thousand euros a month has something to learn from. An account spending six hundred does not.
The difference is arithmetic, not attitude. Systems that widen matching work by trial: show the ad to a category of searches, watch what happens, adjust. On a large budget the trial phase takes a few days and is a small share of the total. On a small budget, the trial phase is the month.
In the example above, five days of matching looser than it should have been cost nearly a hundred euros without a single conversion. In an account with three hundred a month, that is a third of the budget. In one with thirty thousand, it is noise.
Which is why our recommendation is not the same for everyone. Large budgets: turn AI Max on early, with a clean measurement. Small budgets and local services: go the tight route, keep generic terms on exact match, and leave the widening until you have enough conversions for the system to learn from. On what a click actually costs in a local market, we published the numbers in the by-industry comparison, Cluj against Florence.
What these numbers do not say
| What someone might read into it | What the data actually says |
|---|---|
| „AI Max damages accounts” | We have no measurement on AI Max at all. We have one on phrase match, in one account, over five days |
| „86% of the budget is wasted” | 86% is of the visible portion of the cost (€41.58), not of the total. The other 55% of the budget has no itemised terms, so it cannot be classified |
| „The 7% figure is a promise” | It is an average published by Google, on Google's accounts, for the full feature suite against search term matching alone. We cannot verify it |
| „The migration happens to everyone on 1 September” | September is what Google's documentation commits to. 1 September is the start date given in the email. The pace is not published |
| „Zero conversions means a bad campaign” | Five days on a new campaign is not a verdict. Two configuration items were also still outstanding in that window |
The words, in a table
| Term | What it means, briefly |
|---|---|
| AI Max | Bundle of features for Search campaigns: widened matching, copy rewriting, landing page substitution |
| Automatically created assets | Headlines and descriptions written by Google, added on top of yours. Renamed „text customization” |
| Campaign-level broad match | A switch that treats every keyword in the campaign as broad, however you wrote them |
| Search term matching | Your ad appears on searches your keyword list does not cover |
| Text customization | Headline and description rewritten based on the query and the page |
| Final URL expansion | Google picks a different page on your site than the one in the ad |
| Dynamic Search Ads | Ads generated from site content, without keywords. Migrating in February 2027 |
| Other search terms | The report row that totals the searches Google will not show individually |
Where you stand, in three thresholds
Open the account and look at the Search campaigns. One of three answers:
- No Search campaign has either feature on. You are not on the list. Check anyway, because the tick sets itself on new campaigns, and check again in October.
- One of the two is on. You are on the list. You have until the end of August to choose: switch it off, or switch AI Max on with your own settings. Take the 30-day search terms export while you are in there.
- Both are on. You get the widest package, ad copy rewriting included. If your wording is constrained in any way — a regulated profession, claims you are not allowed to make, phrasing a lawyer signed off — yours is the first case to resolve, and not in the last week of August.
If you are at the third and have nobody to look at it, that is exactly the kind of job people call us for: a Google Ads agency that goes into the account, takes the inventory, and tells you what is about to change before it changes. First conversation is free and has no script.
Questions nobody has actually asked us
The heading is honest: this was written the day the news landed, so nobody has had time to ask us anything. The questions below are the ones we would have in the reader's place, plus the ones that come up anyway whenever an automatic migration is announced.
Is 1 September the official date or not?
Half. Google's own documentation — two help pages and the ads blog — commits to „starting in September 2026” and no further. The 1 September date comes from the email sent to advertisers on 5 August.
Plan for the first, treat the month as the firm part. And watch for the upgrade banner in the interface, which is how Google says you will know your turn has come.
Where do I find the campaign-level broad match switch?
In the Search campaign settings, in the keywords section. Do not confuse it with how your keywords are written: you can have every keyword on exact match and the switch on, in which case the campaign treats them all as broad.
If your search terms report is full of searches with no relation to your list, that is the first sign.
What happens to my negative keywords?
They stay and they keep blocking. After a widening they become the most important tool in the account, because they are the only thing left saying „not here”.
Practical move before September: promote the negative list to account level rather than campaign level, and add the irrelevant search terms from the last three months.
If I switch off automatically created assets, does performance drop?
It might, and it is only fair to say so. Automatically created assets do sometimes produce headlines that beat the human-written ones, especially in accounts where the ads have not been touched in a while.
The right test: switch them off on one campaign, not all of them, and compare for two weeks. If nothing measurable moves, you gained control for free.
Is the 7% figure worth anything?
It is worth exactly what it says, which is narrower than it looks. It compares the full AI Max suite against search term matching alone — not against a campaign with no AI Max.
It is also Google's own average across Google's own accounts. Useful as a direction, useless as a forecast for your account.
I only run Performance Max. Am I affected?
Not by this. The migration is strictly about Search campaigns and two settings that exist only there.
If you run both, check only the Search side.
What happens if I do nothing?
The campaign moves to AI Max with settings that mirror the current configuration. Nothing stops, nothing is deleted, the budget stays.
What changes is which searches you appear on. Without a search terms export taken beforehand, you will not be able to demonstrate that anything changed — and that is the unpleasant part.
I am in a regulated profession. Does that matter?
It matters a great deal, and it is the case where we push hardest for choosing deliberately. Text customization rewrites headlines and descriptions; if your wording is limited by professional rules or by legal review, automatic rewriting is a risk you cannot inspect in advance.
The clean route there is to have no automatically created assets at all, which keeps you out of the copy-rewriting half.
How will I know in October whether the migration cost me?
Compare three things against the August baseline: the share of cost sitting in „other search terms”, the cost per conversion, and the list of your ten most expensive visible search terms.
If the first goes up and the second follows, you have an answer. If the first goes up and the second goes down, the widening suits you and there is nothing to fix.
Who should handle this if I have no time?
Anyone with edit access and a spare hour. It is not complicated: campaign inventory, two switches, one export.
If you would rather someone else did it, that is what we do at Google Ads management — and you get the inventory in writing, not just the outcome. Ask us again in three to six months 😉
Last updated: 9 August 2026. The automatic upgrade of campaigns using automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match is confirmed on Google's own domain in three places consulted the same day: help pages 13389795 and 11259373, and the ads blog post on the Dynamic Search Ads move to AI Max. All three say „starting in September 2026”. The 1 September date comes from the Google Ads email of 5 August 2026, reported on 7 August by ppc.land and Search Engine Roundtable. The 7% figure and its comparison point are quoted from the blog post. The client account figures were read on 31 July 2026. We will update this page if Google fixes a public day or moves the month.
