One of the 12 electrical contractors we studied in our example market, Columbus, Ohio, has a panel upgrade page with good news for homeowners. It says a federal program "is currently providing a rebate of 30% off of a panel upgrade," that "the incentive will continue to run until December 31, 2032," and that it "provides a maximum of $600."
That describes a real credit, the federal energy-efficient home improvement credit. It did cover panels of 200 amps or more. According to the IRS, it covered work finished through December 31, 2025, and it's over. The page didn't get the memo.
Nobody at that shop wrote a Google ad promising homeowners a 30% federal credit. But Google's AI Max can write ads from a shop's own website, and it doesn't know which pages are three years out of date. This chapter covers what AI Max is, why it's the last thing an electrical account switches on, and the cleanup that has to happen first.
AI Max Is Broad Match, a Copywriter and a Landing Page Picker in One Switch
AI Max is a setting on a Search campaign, not a separate campaign. Turning it on adds three things at once:
- Search term matching. The campaign can show on searches beyond your keywords, using broad match plus Google's reading of your ads and your landing pages. In some cases it matches searches with no keyword behind them at all.
- Text customization. Google drafts more headlines and descriptions on its own, starting from the words already in your ads, on your pages and in your assets, and finishing them with generative AI. This is the old "automatically created assets," renamed and folded in.
- Final URL expansion. A click meant for your panel page can land on any page of your site that Google's model scores higher. It only works with text customization on, so the ad copy can match the page it lands on.
New Search campaigns come with AI Max already on. Chapter 9 switched it off at build, and that was deliberate. Every one of those three parts loosens a control this guide spent twelve chapters tightening: the exact-match keywords from Chapter 6, the ads written from your reviews in Chapter 8, the landing pages matched to each service in Chapter 4. AI Max can make an account bigger. It can't make an account better that isn't already good. Final URL expansion makes the stakes plain. Chapter 10 found how-to and advice articles on at least nine of the 12 example sites. With AI Max on, a search Google judges to be a question can land on one of those articles, with a headline Google wrote from it.
An Electrician's Panel Upgrade Page Still Promises a 30 Percent Federal Credit. The IRS Already Ended It.
The panel page isn't alone. We read the pages of all 12 example sites and found two still promising federal money that no longer exists:
- A panel upgrade page from an independent shop, quoted above. The IRS says the energy-efficient home improvement credit, which covered panelboards, sub-panels, branch circuits and feeders of 200 amps or more when they supported qualifying energy equipment, applied to improvements through December 31, 2025.
- An EV charger page from a franchise territory, saying "the federal government and many local electric utilities offer rebates and incentives that can cut the cost of purchasing and installing a home EV charger almost in half." The federal credit for home charging equipment covered property placed in service through June 30, 2026, and only in eligible census tracts while it ran.
Two of 12 is a minority, and we're not naming either shop. Pages like these usually go up when the incentive is real, rank well in Google's free results, and get forgotten. That's exactly the problem. A page you haven't looked at in three years is still a page AI Max can read.
Finding those pages on your own site takes an afternoon. Open your sitemap, usually at your web address followed by /sitemap.xml, and skim the list for anything you don't recognize. Then search your site for the words that date fastest in this trade:
- Incentives: "tax credit," "rebate," "federal," "Energy Star," "IRA."
- Manufacturer promotions: a generator brand's spring rebate, a charger maker's install offer.
- Prices: any dollar figure, especially "starting at."
- Services you've stopped offering, and towns you no longer drive to.
- People: a master electrician named on the about page who left two years ago.
Anything that isn't true today gets updated or deleted before AI Max is switched on.
For a model of how to write about incentives, look at Weekley Electric's EV charger page. Its answer to whether rebates are available reads, in full: "There may be local or state incentives available. We'll help you identify any applicable programs during our consultation." No dollar figure, no federal promise, nothing that expires. An AI writing headlines from that page has nothing dangerous to borrow.
An Expired Credit in an AI-Written Ad Is Still Your Promise
Google's advertising policies treat this seriously. An offer an ad promises has to be real, available to the person who sees it, and stated on the page the ad sends them to. "30% federal credit on panel upgrades" in an ad, landing on a page that says the same thing, is a promise the shop can't keep, whoever drafted the headline.
The cost lands in the shop, not at Google. A homeowner who calls about the 30% credit is either disappointed on the phone or, worse, finds out after the work is done. Chapter 8 showed which reviews follow a surprise about money: the fee nobody mentioned was the most repeated price complaint in the example market. A credit that doesn't exist is the same surprise, only bigger.
None of this means incentives are off the table. State and utility programs are where the live money is now, and they come and go. One example: California's federally funded home electrification rebates for single-family homes were reported fully reserved statewide by February 2026. If you mention incentives, name the program, link to it, and check it every quarter. And if a program has ended, say so plainly on the page: "The federal credit for panel upgrades ended for work finished after 2025. Ask us about current state and utility programs." That's a sentence AI Max can borrow without getting you in trouble.
URL and Brand Exclusions Fence AI Max Away From the Pages You'd Never Pay to Promote
The real fix is the page itself: update it or take it down. After that, AI Max comes with controls that are worth setting before it ever runs.
- URL exclusions. List the pages AI Max may never land a click on, the ones you'd never pay to send a homeowner to: old incentive pages, outdated blog posts, careers listings, expired coupon pages. Chapter 10 found how-to articles on at least nine of the 12 example sites; the same list belongs here.
- Brand controls. Brand exclusions keep your ads from showing alongside searches for brands you don't want to be associated with, such as a generator brand you don't install. Brand inclusions narrow AI Max to the brands you do carry.
- Locations of interest. At the ad group level, this lets AI Max reach people based on the places they search for, useful for the town names Chapter 6 found, but only if those towns are on your truck routes.
- Text guidelines, where your account has them. Google is testing a feature that lets you exclude terms from the headlines text customization writes. For an electrical contractor, "tax credit," "rebate," "federal," "free" and "guaranteed" are good first entries. It's an experimental beta, so treat it as a backstop, not a fence.
AI Max Is the Last Switch an Electrical Account Flips, and It Earns a Second Campaign Only After the First
In this guide's build, AI Max is the final step, after the exact-match Isolation campaign, broad-match Exploration and Performance Max are all steady. That's not a calendar date. It's a condition: an account that books jobs at a predictable cost and has enough conversions for Google's automation to learn from. In practice that means Search has run on real conversion data for months, Exploration has held its target cost per lead through at least one busy season, and Performance Max is fenced off from the pages Chapter 10 listed. For most electrical contractors that's well past the six-month mark. For a shop with a big budget and steady call volume, it comes sooner.
Even then, a few rules hold:
- Isolation never gets it. Its whole job is the short list of searches you picked on exact match, at prices you typed in yourself. AI Max would undo both.
- Test it on one campaign. Exploration is the natural candidate, since it's already broad. Compare it against the same campaign without AI Max over at least a month, judged on booked jobs and their value from Chapter 1, not clicks.
- Read everything it writes. Check the search terms report and the generated headlines every week for the first month. If AI Max writes something you wouldn't say on the phone, remove it and add the word to your exclusions.
- Keep your own headlines strong. Text customization builds partly from your existing ads. The review-based headlines from Chapter 8 are the best raw material you can give it.
Some electrical accounts find AI Max adds jobs at a fair price once everything else is in order. Some find it mostly adds noise. The only way to know which is a clean test on a clean website.
Next: Emergency Electrical Searches Cost the Most to Win. Bid on Them Only During Hours Someone Picks Up the Phone.
Chapter 14 is the first of three bonus chapters built around problems specific to electrical work, starting with emergency calls and the hours that make them worth paying for. Chapter 10 covers the same URL fences for Performance Max, and Chapter 9 is where AI Max got switched off in the first place.
The full set of sixteen chapters is gathered on the guide's home page.
Before AI Max goes near an electrical contractor's account under our Google Ads management, we read the website the way AI Max will, page by page. Running your own? Search your own site for "tax credit," "rebate" and "federal" tonight. Every hit is a sentence Google could turn into an ad.
