Every accounting firm website has a basement. It's the pages nobody has opened since they were published: the 2023 promotion that ended two tax seasons ago, the FAQ written during the pandemic, the guarantee page someone copied from a template, the team bio that still says "coming soon." Visitors rarely find them. That's why nobody fixed them.
AI Max finds them. Google's newest Search feature reads a firm's whole website to write ad text, and it has no idea which pages the partners would be embarrassed by. This chapter covers where AI Max belongs in an accounting account, which is at the very end, and the cleanup that has to happen before it gets anywhere near the budget.
AI Max Writes Headlines From Pages Nobody Has Opened Since 2023
AI Max bundles a few features into one switch. The one that matters most for a firm's reputation is text customization: Google generates new headlines and descriptions on its own, built from what's on the firm's site, its landing pages, the ads already running and the ad group's keywords. The partners never see those lines before they run.
For most firms, that would be fine if the website were current. It usually isn't. When we reviewed the websites of 12 accounting businesses for this guide, the stale material wasn't hard to find. Across the sample:
- An offer with a deadline that expired in 2023.
- A tax page still listing filing dates for 2020 and 2021.
- An FAQ still inviting new Employee Retention Credit claims, for a pandemic-era credit whose filing windows have closed.
- A guarantee disclosure with the template placeholder still in it: "INSERT INFORMATION."
- An owner's bio that reads "Bio Coming Soon!"
- The same service at one price on its service page and a different price on the pricing page.
Each of those is a line of text Google can read. An expired discount can become a headline promising it. An old price can become a description quoting it. And under the professional rules Chapter 8 walked through, a fee that appears in an ad is a fee the firm may be held to.
AI Max Can't Run on Isolation Anyway. It Needs Smart Bidding.
The good news is that AI Max can't touch the campaign most accounting accounts depend on. All three of AI Max's working parts, the looser matching, the page swapping and the self-written text, only function when the campaign bids automatically toward conversions. Google's setup page is explicit about it. Isolation, the exact-match campaign from Chapter 6, is the one place in the account where a partner decides every bid. So AI Max stays off in Isolation for good.
There's a second reason it never belongs there. Google says AI Max's search term matching expands a campaign's keywords using broad match. Isolation exists precisely to keep the account's most important searches under exact-match control. Turning on AI Max there would quietly undo the whole point of the campaign.
That leaves Exploration, the broad-match campaign that already runs on automated bidding. AI Max is a candidate there, but it's the last thing added in the whole rollout. By that point a tax firm has several seasons' worth of real inquiries on record, a negative list that already blocks the software shoppers, and a firm number for what a prospect call should cost. AI Max has something real to learn from, and the firm has a baseline to judge it against.
As Chapter 9 covered, new Search campaigns arrive with AI Max switched on. Every campaign in the account should start with it off. Turning it on is a decision the firm makes later, on purpose.
Exclusion Lists Can't Save a Website Still Quoting 2023 Offers
Google gives advertisers controls for AI Max's writing, and the next section covers them. But controls are the second line of defense. The first is the website itself.
Before AI Max goes on in any campaign, spend an hour reading the firm's own site the way AI Max will: every page, including the old ones. Look for:
- Expired offers and old deadlines. Anything with a year in it deserves a second look.
- Closed programs. Pandemic-era credits, one-time relief programs and old stimulus pages. If the firm no longer does the work, the page comes down.
- Template leftovers. Placeholder text, "coming soon" bios, lorem ipsum in a footer. They look careless to a person and read as fact to a machine.
- Prices that don't match. Every published fee should be the same everywhere it appears, or not published at all.
- Claims the firm wouldn't put in an ad. "Maximum refund," "guaranteed," "pennies on the dollar." If it's on the site, AI Max can say it too.
Accounting sites are more exposed to this than most, because tax work dates itself. Every season adds pages with a year in the title: this year's deadlines, this year's changes, this year's mileage rate, this year's contribution limits. A plumber's site can go five years without a date on it. A tax practice's site collects a new layer every January, and the old layers rarely come down. Each one stays accurate for twelve months and then quietly turns into a page that tells the wrong story.
Picture how that plays out. A 2023 blog post says the firm will "maximize your refund" and lists that year's standard deduction. Nobody has looked at it in three years. AI Max reads it, likes the phrase, and writes a headline promising to maximize refunds, under an ad that points to the firm's current tax page. The partners find out when a prospect quotes the ad back to them on the phone. That example is ours, built from the kinds of pages the audit found, but nothing in it requires bad luck. It only requires an old page and a switch left on.
So put the cleanup on the calendar, not just on the launch checklist. The natural time is early January, before the phones start ringing: take down or update last year's dated pages, archive anything about a closed program, and read every page that mentions a fee. It takes an afternoon. It's also good for the people who find those pages through ordinary search.
Fixing the pages fixes more than the ads. The same stale page that could become a bad headline is also the page a prospect might land on from a search, and it's doing the firm no favors there either.
Twenty-Five Banned Words Keep "Maximum Refund" Out of a Tax Firm's Ads
Once the site is clean, set the guardrails. Google calls them text guidelines, and they come in two kinds.
The first is a short list of banned words for each campaign. Google caps it at 25. Capital letters don't matter, and each word only covers its own language, so a firm that writes ads in Spanish, as Chapter 9 suggested, needs Spanish entries too.
The second kind is a plain-English instruction, and it handles one trap in particular. Banning the dollar sign doesn't stop AI Max from writing prices. Google says so directly. To keep prices out of generated text, add the restriction telling Google not to generate assets with prices.
For an accounting firm, a starting list might include:
- "guaranteed" and "maximum refund," which promise outcomes nobody can honestly promise.
- "pennies on the dollar," the classic line of tax debt marketing. The IRS's 2026 Dirty Dozen list of tax scams called out aggressive Offer in Compromise marketing that overpromises results.
- "IRS-approved" and "IRS certified," which imply a relationship the IRS doesn't offer.
- "free," unless every free offer on the site states its conditions right beside it.
- "Employee Retention Credit" and "ERC," if the firm no longer handles those claims.
The licensed titles, "CPA," "certified" and the rest, belong on that list for some firms and not others, depending on who's on staff. Chapter 14 takes those words one at a time.
A URL Exclusion Is All That Stands Between AI Max and a Tax Firm's Client Login
AI Max can also send a click to a different page than the one the ad names, the same Final URL expansion Chapter 10 covered for Performance Max. The control for it is URL exclusions, set at the campaign level. They need text customization and Final URL expansion switched on to do anything, which is fine: those are the two features that make them necessary.
Exclude the same pages as in Performance Max: client login and portal pages, document upload and organizer pages, payment pages, careers pages and tax debt pages. Add any page from the cleanup list that the firm decided to keep but doesn't want advertised.
Then watch what AI Max brings in. Google adds "AI Max" as its own match type in the search terms report, so the new searches it found are easy to separate from the ones the keywords would have caught anyway. For the first month, read that report every morning, the same routine Exploration got in Chapter 6. Add negatives for the strangers. Promote the good finds into Isolation as exact match. And look at the generated headlines in the asset report, line by line, to make sure none of them came from a page the cleanup missed.
If after a month AI Max is bringing in real inquiries at a cost the firm can live with, keep it. If it's mostly spending on searches Exploration already found, turn it off. Either answer is fine. It's the last feature in the rollout for a reason: by the time a firm gets here, everything else is already working, and AI Max has to earn its place against that.
Next: The Words Only a Licensed CPA Can Use
Chapter 14 goes word by word through the titles and claims that state licensing boards and the IRS regulate, and what each one means for a firm's ads, keywords and landing pages.
Earlier chapters: Chapter 12 on Local Services Ads, and Chapter 10 on Performance Max. The accounting guide's home page lists every chapter.
Cleaning up a firm's website before AI Max ever reads it is part of our Google Ads management.
