Google AI Max: what it is and what to do before it changes your campaigns

If you run Google Ads and you've seen "AI Max" mentioned in your account recently and wondered what it actually is - you're not alone. Google announced it on 6 May 2025 - and featured it at Google Marketing Live on 21 May 2025 - and it's been generating more confusion than clarity ever since. The short version: it's a significant change to how Search campaigns work, one existing campaign type is being switched off because of it, and there are a few things worth doing before the migration deadline regardless of whether you plan to use it.

This is not another "AI is taking over your ads" panic piece. It's a plain explanation of what's changed, what it means practically, and how to think about it for a normal Google Ads account.

What is Google AI Max?

AI Max is a feature set that sits inside your existing Search campaigns. When you enable it, Google uses AI to extend your ads beyond the keyword list you've written - matching them to searches it thinks are relevant based on your website content, your landing pages, and a set of signals called Search Themes that you provide.

It's not a separate campaign type. You don't create an "AI Max campaign" the way you create a Performance Max campaign. You enable it inside a Search campaign you already have, and it layers new capabilities on top.

The three things it adds are:

• Broader search term matching. Your ads can show on searches that aren't in your keyword list, if Google decides they're relevant. AI Max can trigger on searches that don't match any keyword in your list.
• URL expansion. Google can send a click to a different page on your site than the one you specified, if it thinks another page is a better match for that search.
• Brand controls. New settings that let you decide how AI Max handles searches for your own brand name and competitor brand names - things that were harder to control cleanly before.

One thing worth noting on scope: AI Max started as a Search-campaign feature, and through 2026 Google has been extending the same AI-matching approach into Shopping and Travel campaigns too. For most advertisers the Search implementation is the one that matters day to day, and that's what the rest of this piece focuses on - but if you run Shopping or Travel campaigns, expect the same logic to arrive there.

What is it replacing?

Dynamic Search Ads - DSAs. If you've used them, you'll recognise the idea: a campaign type where you pointed Google at your website and it automatically generated ad headlines and matched your ads to relevant searches, without you having to write keywords. The upside was catching searches you'd never have thought to target. The downside was it could go quite wide, and the lack of keyword control made it harder to manage spend.

Google originally planned to retire DSAs in September 2026, but delayed the forced migration on 11 June 2026. As part of that delay, Google also temporarily restored the ability to create new DSA campaigns from 15 June 2026 - that window closes again in January 2027. The full revised timeline: new DSA creation is blocked from January 2027, and remaining campaigns are auto-migrated to AI Max in February 2027. If you're running DSAs now, that's still a firm deadline worth planning around. AI Max is the replacement - it absorbs the same job of catching keyword-gap searches, but integrates it into regular Search campaigns and gives you more visibility over what's actually triggering your ads.

If you've never run DSAs, the February 2027 deadline doesn't directly affect you. Worth a quick check though: campaigns using Automatically Created Assets or campaign-level broad match are on a separate migration schedule, with auto-upgrade to AI Max starting September 2026 - so it's worth confirming whether either of those apply to your account. Either way, AI Max will increasingly become Google's default answer for "how do I reach searches I'm missing?" and it's worth understanding now.

What are Search Themes?

Search Themes are the AI Max equivalent of DSA targets. With DSAs, you pointed Google at your website pages and it worked out what to show your ads for. With AI Max, you provide a list of topics or phrases that describe your business - "commercial electrician Perth", "three-phase power installation", "switchboard upgrades" - and Google uses those themes alongside your existing keywords and landing pages to decide when to serve your ads.

They're not keywords. You don't set bids on them, they don't have match types, and Google doesn't treat them as hard triggers. They're signals - hints about your intent that inform the AI's matching decisions. If your keyword list already covers the territory well, Search Themes add less. If you have gaps - a complex service catalogue, niche products, customers who search in unpredictable ways - they can catch things your keywords miss.

Should you enable AI Max now?

Not automatically, and not on your best-performing campaigns first. AI Max is now on by default for any new Search campaign - you need to opt out during setup if you don't want it. For existing campaigns it is still a deliberate opt-in. Either way, once AI Max is active, URL expansion and text customisation (where Google can rewrite your headlines and descriptions using your landing page content) are both on by default within the suite, though you can turn either off individually. The sensible approach is to test it on a campaign with stable-but-not-critical spend before touching anything core to your business.

The thing that needs watching most is URL expansion. If you leave the defaults, Google can send paid clicks to any page on your site it deems relevant - which could mean a blog post, a category page, or a page that's technically related but not built to convert. The fix is straightforward: restrict URL expansion to specific pages or page types in the campaign settings, so AI Max operates within boundaries you've set rather than across your whole site.

Brand controls are also worth setting deliberately rather than leaving at defaults. Decide upfront whether you want AI Max to show on searches for your own brand name (usually you don't, because branded search campaigns handle that more efficiently) and how you want to handle competitor brand searches.

AI Max vs Performance Max - what's the difference?

They're different things, and Google's naming doesn't help. Performance Max is a cross-channel campaign type - it runs across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps at once, with AI deciding how to allocate your budget across all of them. You give it creative assets and audience signals, and it operates largely autonomously. Transparency is limited: you get aggregate performance, not a proper search terms report.

AI Max is Search-only. You keep your keywords, you keep your ad copy control, and you can still see what searches actually triggered your ads. It's AI-assisted Search rather than fully automated cross-channel. For most small-to-medium advertisers who want to stay in control of where their money goes, AI Max is the more manageable of the two.

The three things worth doing before January 2027

1. Check whether you're running DSAs. Log into Google Ads, click Campaigns, and look for any campaign labelled "Dynamic Search Ads" in the type column. If you have them, you need a plan to migrate - either to AI Max or to standard Search campaigns with proper keywords - before January 2027, when new DSA creation is blocked.

2. If you enable AI Max, restrict URL expansion immediately. Don't leave it at the default "all pages" setting. Go to the AI Max settings within the campaign and limit expansion to the pages that are actually built to convert - product pages, service pages, landing pages. Take blog posts and informational pages out of scope.

3. Watch the search terms report closely for the first month. AI Max's wider matching means it can surface searches you'd never have targeted yourself. Some of those will be genuinely useful discovery - searches you should have been running keywords for all along. Others will be irrelevant spend. The search terms report tells you which is which. The report is a starting point rather than a clean signal - some entries will overlap with searches your existing keywords already capture - but it is enough to identify what needs a negative and what is worth following up on.

The honest take

AI Max has genuine upside for advertisers with catalogue depth or complex offerings - businesses where the customers search in a hundred different ways and keyword lists are always incomplete. For tightly-managed accounts running a handful of well-understood keywords, the incremental benefit is smaller and the monitoring overhead is real.

It's not a reason to panic, and it's not a reason to ignore. The DSA migration is the hard deadline: Google delayed it once already - September 2026 became February 2027 in June 2026. If you have those campaigns, they need attention before then. Everything else is a question of whether the trade-off - more reach in exchange for less keyword-level control - suits your account.

If you'd like a plain read of where your Google Ads account stands with this - whether your campaigns need migrating, whether AI Max makes sense for your setup, or just what's actually happening in there - get in touch.