Many chiropractic websites carry pages nobody has read in years. An old blog post. A service page a past web designer wrote from a template. A testimonials page that collects every kind thing a patient ever said. The practice forgets them. Google's newest automation doesn't.
This chapter is about AI Max, the setting Chapter 9 switched off before launch. It's the last piece of automation in a chiropractic account, and the one most likely to put words in front of a patient that the practice never chose for an ad.
AI Max Reaches Chiropractic Searches You Never Added, the Way Broad Match Does
A chiropractor who flips the AI Max switch is really turning on three things at once:
- Search term matching, which Google builds on its broad match technology plus the practice's assets and pages, so a sciatica ad group can show for searches nobody added to it.
- Text customization, which writes extra headlines and descriptions on the practice's behalf.
- Final URL expansion, which can trade the condition page you chose for some other page on the domain. Chapter 10 unchecked it in Performance Max.
The first one matters most for how a chiropractic account is built. Isolation, the first campaign, is exact match on purpose (Chapter 5). Exploration, the second, adds broad match deliberately, once the account books about 30 quality leads a month (Chapter 6). AI Max adds broad-match-style reach to a campaign whether or not you planned it. Turned on in Isolation, it undoes the whole point of Isolation. That's why it comes last, and why Chapter 9 switched it off in every new campaign.
When it does run, the search terms report gets a new match type labeled "AI Max," with a column showing whether each match came from broad match expansion or from matching without a keyword at all. Google also adds a view that puts the search, the headline that showed and the landing page side by side. For a chiropractor, that view is the one to read: it shows exactly what a patient typed, what AI Max said back, and where the click went.
Two Chiropractic Sites We Read Carry the Same "Higher Immune System Function" Line, Word for Word
For this guide, we read the websites of twelve chiropractic practices that advertise in our example market, Baltimore. We searched every page we collected for two things a chiropractic ad should never say.
The immune system. Five of the twelve sites mention it, three of them on care pages. Two of them carry the same template paragraph, word for word, saying that once "nerve interference is removed, the body experiences an increase in blood flow, higher immune system function, proper motor pattern firing, and overall better health." Another says that if "your nervous system is being compromised, your immune system may be compromised and malfunctioning." A fourth says its care can "boost the immune system." A fifth lists "post-viral and immune system support" among its acupuncturist's areas of expertise.
"Cured." Three of the twelve sites host patient testimonials using the word, such as one patient who wrote, "Cured is a word as a cardiologist I don't use very often but in this case it applies."
None of this is unusual on a chiropractic website, and none of it was written as ad copy. That's the problem. Lines like these often sit on pages a practice stopped thinking about years ago, and nothing in a Google Ads account flags them until an AI-written headline puts one in front of a patient.
AI Max Can Write a Chiropractor's Headlines From Any Page on the Site, the Blog Included
Text customization, Google's setup page explains, borrows from the chiropractor's domain and landing pages as well as from what's already in the account. Your domain means the whole site: the blog, the old service pages, the testimonials.
So when AI Max writes a new headline for the neck pain ad group, its source material isn't only the careful ads from Chapter 8. It can include a template paragraph about immune function or a testimonial that says "cured." Final URL expansion adds the second half of the risk: the click can land on one of those pages too.
The Performance Max help page notes that you stay responsible for landing page content and every asset it generates, and the same logic holds here. The automation writes the line; the practice owns it.
The FTC Has Already Warned Chiropractors About Immunity Claims
This isn't a theoretical risk for chiropractors in particular.
In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sent waves of warning letters to businesses making unsupported COVID-19 claims, and chiropractic offices were among them. One letter quoted a small-town chiropractic office's post headlined "Improved Immunity During Covid-19." That letter went further than the posts it quoted: FTC staff had reviewed the practice's website and social media page, and the letter told the practice to review all its other claims too, "immediately cease" any that weren't backed by reliable evidence, and report back within 48 hours on what it had changed.
The FTC's May 7, 2020 batch of 45 letters listed a Georgia chiropractic practice under its own heading, "Chiropractic Therapy." The letters said the claims weren't supported by scientific evidence. And the FTC's first case under a new federal COVID-19 marketing law, announced April 15, 2021, charged a St. Louis chiropractor and his company.
For an ad account, the lesson is simple. The FTC read whole websites, not just ads. AI Max can draw on any page of that same website, including page 40 of a blog.
Google has its own rule too. Its claims policy rules out promising to cure an illness that has no proven cure, and a patient testimonial promising a specific result has to carry an on-screen note that results vary. An AI-written headline doesn't get a pass on either.
Term Exclusions Keep Words Like "Cure" and "Immune" Out of Anything AI Max Writes for a Chiropractor
Two fixes, in this order.
Clean up the site first. Search your own pages for "immune," "immunity," "cure" and "cured," and for any claim you wouldn't make to a patient's face. A Google search for site:yourpractice.com immune finds most of them in a minute; your website platform's own search finds the rest, including old blog posts that never made it into the menu. Check pages the website company added for you, too: two of the sites we read carried the same immune-function paragraph, which suggests, though we can't confirm it, that it came from a shared template rather than either doctor. Rewrite the care pages. Move testimonials that promise results onto a page with a clear "results vary" note, or retire them. This helps the website on its own, before any ad is involved.
Then add text guidelines. Google's text guidelines give a campaign two controls. Term exclusions name exact words or phrases that generated text can never use; a campaign gets 25 of them. Messaging restrictions describe concepts to avoid in plain language. Google says the guidelines work on new and existing campaigns. One detail matters for a practice that runs Spanish ads (Chapter 9): Google says term exclusions are language-specific, so excluding "cure" doesn't block "cura." Messaging restrictions, by contrast, apply across languages. A chiropractic starter set:
- Term exclusions: immune, immunity, cure, cured, guarantee, permanent, and the Spanish equivalents if you run Spanish ads.
- Messaging restrictions: don't make claims about the immune system or about curing any condition; don't promise specific results.
AI Max Learns From Booked Patients, So a Chiropractor Without Steady Bookings Has Nothing to Teach It
Google's setup page ties all three AI Max features to bidding that runs on conversions. A chiropractic account that books a handful of patients a month gives that bidding almost nothing to learn from.
That's the same gate as the rest of the automation in this guide. Exploration waited for about 30 quality leads a month. Performance Max waited longer. AI Max comes after both, once the account has steady calls, forms and kept first visits flowing back from Chapter 1's tracking, and once the practice knows what a new patient costs from Chapter 3's worksheet.
One AI Max Test Campaign Teaches a Chiropractor More Than Switching It On Everywhere
When the account is ready, don't flip AI Max on across the board. Test it.
The Experiments page inside Google Ads offers an AI Max experiment: a one-click test that, instead of copying the campaign, splits your current campaign 50/50 between the version with AI Max and the version without. Run it on Exploration, the campaign already built to find new searches, and leave Isolation alone.
Each week of the test, a chiropractor or the person running the account should check three things:
- The AI Max search terms. Are they patients? Add negatives for anything that isn't, just as Chapter 6 taught.
- The generated headlines. Read every one. If a claim slips past the guidelines, add the word to the exclusions.
- Cost per kept first visit. Not clicks, not Google's conversion count alone. If the AI Max half brings real patients at a similar or lower cost, keep it. If it doesn't, end the test.
Give the test long enough for both halves to book real patients, several weeks at least, and don't change the campaign while it runs. A test stopped after a few days mostly measures luck.
If you'd like someone to clean up the site and run the test with you, our Google Ads agency team reviews a practice's pages for exactly these claims before switching on any AI feature.
Next: Car Accident Chiropractor Searches Carry the Highest Bids in Chiropractic
Auto injury is a different business inside many chiropractic practices, with its own searches, payers and rules. Chapter 14 looks at the bids those searches carry and why they belong in their own campaign. The earlier chapters, from the map pack back to tracking, are on the Google Ads for Chiropractors guide home.
