AI Max Writes Ads From Your Website. 4 of 12 Shop Sites We Checked Gave Conflicting Ages for the Business.

One Portland-area transmission shop's Search ad says it has been "Specializing in Transmission and Clutch Repair For Over 70 Years." Its home page says "For more than 30 years." A service page on the same site says "Since 1944." Its clutch page carries both "more than seven decades" in the text and "Over 30 Years of Experience" in the heading. Each line was probably true when someone wrote it. Read together, they describe three different businesses.

That shop isn't unusual. We read the websites of 12 Portland-area repair shops, 11 of them running Search ads, and 4 of the 12 gave conflicting ages for the business. Another said "Since 1983" on the home page and said "for the past 34 years" on the about page. A third ran an ad saying "Since 1978" while its site said "more than 40 years" on one page and "Over 50 Years" on another.

None of that mattered much while a person wrote every ad. It matters once Google writes them. AI Max for Search reads the shop's website and builds headlines from it, and Google turns it on for every new Search campaign. Chapter 12 covered the listings Google builds from a Business Profile. This chapter covers the ads Google builds from the website, and why it's the last feature a repair account should turn on.

AI Max Picks the Searches, Writes the Headlines and Chooses Which Shop Page Each Driver Lands On

AI Max lives inside the shop's ordinary Search campaign as three switches, and Google flips them on for any campaign the shop creates from scratch. The switches are:

• Search term matching. Shows the ads on searches the shop never added as keywords.
• Text customization. Writes new headlines and descriptions from the shop's website and existing ads.
• Final URL expansion. Sends each driver to whichever page on the site Google judges the best fit, not the page the shop picked.

Each one hands a decision from the shop to Google: which searches to pay for, what the ad says, and where the click lands. Chapter 9 switched AI Max off at launch for that reason. The exact match brake keywords from Chapter 6 exist so the shop decides all three.

This chapter covers when to turn it back on, and what to fix on the website first.

Text Customization Writes Headlines From Your Site. A Wrong Year on One Page Can End Up in an Ad.

Google's help page lists what text customization reads. The new assets "are generated based on your ad's unique context, which includes your domain, landing page, existing ads, and keywords in your ad group." The domain means the whole site, not only the landing page. An about page last edited in 2015, a tire coupon that expired in the spring, a blog post about a service the shop dropped: all of it is source material.

That's where the 12-site check stops being trivia. Besides the 4 sites with conflicting ages, we found:

• Hours that disagree with themselves on 1 site. The header said "Mon - Sat: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM." The body copy said "Monday - Friday, 9am - 5pm," with weekends "by appointment."
• A rating that doesn't match the ads on 1 site. The site said "4.7 star rating based on 471 reviews." Its Search ads showed 3.7 stars from about 270 reviews.
• Text or links from another business on 3 sites. One booking widget promised another shop's "Peace of Mind Promise." Another had a footer phone link with an out-of-state area code. A dealer service page was headed "Subaru Express Service at Subaru of America."
• Booking links that didn't work on 2 sites.

A person writing ads by hand skips the stale page without thinking. A system writing from the whole domain has no way to know which "since" is the true one, or that the 9-to-5 line was left over from a slower year. We can't say which line Google would pick on any given search. The point is that the shop no longer picks.

So before AI Max goes on, the site gets the same edit an ad would. These five checks come straight from what we found:

1. One founding year, everywhere. Search the site for "since," "years" and "decades," and make every one agree.
2. One set of hours. The same hours in the header, the footer, the contact page and the Business Profile.
3. The current rating, or none. A star count typed into a page goes stale, and an ad written from it repeats the stale number.
4. No leftover template text. Every widget, footer link and phone number names this shop.
5. Booking links that work. Click each one from a phone.

The same check pays off without AI Max. A driver comparing two shops reads the about page too.

Search Term Matching Shows Your Ads on Searches You Never Added. It Works Like Broad Match With Fewer Limits.

Google's description of search term matching is direct: "you can expand upon your existing keywords using broad match and keywordless technology to find more relevant and high-performing search queries." Google says it learns from the keywords, the ads and the pages the shop already has. In practice the shop's keywords become a starting point, and the website fills in the rest.

For a repair shop, that cuts both ways. Search term matching can find the driver who typed "car shakes when I brake at highway speed," a search no shop would think to add. It can also match a page about a service the shop barely does, or a blog post about tire pressure, to searches the shop doesn't want to pay for.

That's why it waits. In our build, the Exploration campaign's broad match is the account's first step past its own keyword list, and it only starts once the exact match Isolation campaign is booking 30 or more quality conversions a month. Search term matching goes on later still, after broad match has a few months of booked repairs behind it. By then the shop has negative keyword lists built from real search terms and knows which jobs cost too much to win.

Google's own advice backs the split. Its page on reaching the right customers says AI Max gets the most reach with conversion-based Smart Bidding, and that if the goal is something else, like impression share, "you might find traditional match types like phrase match or exact match to be more suitable for your business." That's the Isolation campaign. It stays exact match with hand-set bids, and AI Max never goes on there.

When search term matching is on, read what it's buying. The search terms report can be narrowed to the "AI Max" match type, which lists only the searches it found. The keywords report also carries "Total: AI Max expanded matches" and "Total: AI Max landing page matches" rows at the bottom. A shop that never opens those rows has no idea what it's paying for.

Text Guidelines and URL Exclusions Are the Only Brakes on What AI Max Writes and Where It Sends Drivers

Two controls limit what AI Max can do once it's on.

Text guidelines apply when text customization is running. Google's setup page describes "term exclusions, such as restricted words or phrases, and messaging restrictions to dictate tone and guidelines for the AI-generated text." Google is still testing text guidelines, so check that they show up in the account before counting on them. For a repair shop, the restrictions worth writing first:

• No prices, coupon amounts or discounts the shop isn't honoring this month.
• No "free" inspections, diagnostics or estimates the shop doesn't offer.
• No claims about how long the shop has been open. That line belongs in an ad the shop writes and checks.
• No wording that tells drivers a repair can wait. Chapter 8 answered the upsell fear by showing drivers the worn part, never by suggesting a safety repair is optional, and a generated headline shouldn't undo that.

URL exclusions control final URL expansion. Google puts it plainly: "You can leverage the URL exclusions control to prevent traffic from going to specific pages you don't want customers directed to." A repair shop's list usually includes the careers page, blog posts, an old coupon page, and any service page for work the shop no longer wants. The shop can also name the pages it does want with URL inclusions, but Google notes that with both on, "the URLs you choose as well as the URLs that Google thinks will provide the best performance can be used."

There's also a brand list. A shop can add brand names it doesn't want to pay for, such as Toyota or a national tire chain, to a brand exclusion list for the whole campaign.

None of these controls fixes the website. A messaging restriction can block a claim about years in business, but it can't tell Google which founding year is right. The cleanup comes first.

AI Max Learns From Booked Repairs. A New Shop's Account Doesn't Have Enough of Them Yet.

Google is clear about what AI Max runs on: "Features like search term matching, final URL expansion, and text customization require conversion-based Smart Bidding strategies in order to function effectively." Smart Bidding learns from conversions. In a repair account, the conversions worth learning from are the ones from Chapter 1: calls past 30 seconds and booked appointments, not page views.

A new account doesn't have those yet. That's the whole case for the order this guide has followed:

1. Isolation and brand at launch. Exact match, hand-set bids, the shop decides everything.
2. Exploration at 30 or more quality conversions a month. The broad match campaign, bidding toward a target cost per booked car. Months two and three are typical, but the bookings decide, not the calendar.
3. Performance Max once both Search campaigns hold 30 or more a month. Months six and seven are typical.
4. Demand Gen after that.
5. AI Max last, tested inside the Exploration campaign, never the Isolation campaign.

Google offers a one-click AI Max experiment for this. Instead of copying the campaign, it splits the Exploration campaign's own traffic 50/50 between AI Max on and off. Then grade it the way every campaign in this guide is graded: what each car that actually rolled into a bay cost, according to the shop's repair orders. If the AI Max half books brake and transmission work for less, keep it. If it books oil changes and tire questions, or the search terms report fills with jobs the shop doesn't do, turn it off.

Fixing the website first, then testing AI Max against the shop's own repair orders only after the rest of the account is booking cars, is how our Google Ads management team handles the last stage of a repair account.

Next: A Dealer Can't Void a Warranty Over an Independent Shop's Oil Change. None of 479 Ads We Read Said So.

Chapter 14 turns to the ad copy a repair shop should be writing and isn't: the federal rule that lets drivers keep their warranty at an independent shop.

This chapter is part of Google Ads for Auto Repair, a sixteen-chapter guide for independent repair shops in every state.