A B2B account built the way this guide describes is a set of deliberate choices: the quote and supplier searches a purchasing manager types, an ad that says who the product is for and how big an order has to be, a page for each product line, and bids set by hand until the qualified leads justify automation. AI Max for Search is Google's setting that hands much of that control back to Google.
That's not automatically bad. For a large account with steady conversions, Google reports good results. For a small B2B account, it usually arrives too early and learns from the wrong signals. Below: what AI Max does inside a Search campaign for a B2B company, the conditions Google says it depends on, how it ends up switched on in accounts that never chose it, and the limits to set if you test it anyway. It follows the territory setup from Chapter 12.
AI Max Reads Your B2B Website to Guess New Searches. We Gave Keyword Planner 12 B2B Sites, and Its First Guess Missed on 5.
AI Max has two main parts. The first, which Google calls search term matching, puts a B2B ad in front of searches nobody wrote into the keyword list. Google's help page says it works by expanding your existing keywords with broad match and with what Google calls keywordless technology, and that it learns from the keywords, ads and page addresses already in the campaign when it decides which new searches count as relevant. The second, asset optimization, lets Google write ad text from the company's site and choose the landing page for each click, so a plant engineer might land on whichever page Google judges more relevant, not the one you chose.
So the raw material is the B2B company's own keyword list, ad text and landing pages. In Chapter 5, Keyword Planner got the websites of the twelve Milwaukee-area B2B companies in this guide, and we read every idea it returned. For five of them, the very first idea wasn't a buyer's search at all: "boxes" for the distributor that sells shipping supplies, "cnc machine" for a shop that makes parts to order, "technology solutions professional" for a managed IT firm. For six of the twelve, most of the top-idea volume came from people who weren't buying.
Keyword Planner and AI Max are different tools, and Google doesn't publish how either one reads a page. But both work from what's on your site. Our reading is that if a B2B site's own words pointed one Google tool at homeowners, machine shoppers and job seekers, there's no reason to assume another will read them more carefully. AI Max does have one advantage Keyword Planner doesn't: it can learn from conversions. That's why the next section matters.
AI Max Needs Smart Bidding and a Budget That Isn't Running Out. Most Small B2B Accounts Have Neither.
Google is clear about what AI Max needs. On the setup page, Google writes that all three features require Smart Bidding that steers toward conversions in order to function effectively. On the overview page, it adds that AI Max "won't be effective if campaigns are limited by budget." A B2B owner should read those two sentences as the entry requirements.
Put those next to the typical small B2B account from Chapter 7. Many never reach the roughly 30 qualified leads a month that our method uses as the gate for automated bidding, and they run on hand-set bids for good reason. Many also run on a budget sized to what the sales team can handle, which can leave the campaign limited by budget on busy days.
That account fails both of Google's conditions. And the conversion data matters more than the bidding label. Smart Bidding steers toward whatever you count as a conversion. If that's every form fill, AI Max will learn to find more people who fill out forms, the same trap Performance Max falls into in Chapter 10. If it's the qualified lead from Chapter 1, it has something worth learning from, but only once there are enough of them.
New Search Campaigns Come With AI Max Already On. Google Didn't Ask Whether Your B2B Account Was Ready.
None of that stops Google from switching it on. A distributor or machine shop setting up its first Search campaign finds AI Max preselected, and the ad-writing and page-picking features preselected with it. Chapter 9 covered switching it off at launch, along with the other defaults.
Older campaigns aren't exempt. Google's blog, as updated June 11, 2026, gives two start dates for the move. The first, September 2026, covers campaigns where Google was already writing extra ad text or where broad match was switched on for the whole campaign. The second, February 2027, covers Dynamic Search Ads. If an account has been running for a few years, it's worth opening the settings of every Search campaign and checking what's on.
Google's own number for AI Max deserves a fair hearing: the same blog post reports an average lift of 7% in conversions or conversion value, at a similar cost per conversion or return, for advertisers running the full feature set. That's an average across Google's advertisers, not a B2B figure, and it's measured in conversions, not in qualified B2B leads.
With AI Max On, Your B2B Keyword List Is No Longer the Whole List of Searches You Pay For.
The exact match campaign from Chapter 6, which we call Isolation, exists for one reason: so you know exactly which searches you're paying for. AI Max's search term matching is built to do the opposite, to find searches you didn't list. Google's own page notes a side effect for campaigns that switch off the broad match campaign setting or move to AI Max: broad keywords no longer get the priority exact match keywords get, and Google suggests adding exact match copies to keep it.
The two practitioners in our research who addressed AI Max both say to switch it off. One agency that works only with managed IT firms tells its audience to opt out of AI Max, saying it burns spend without much to show for it. Another practitioner who builds campaigns for IT firms says to turn it off at the start.
Our rule follows from the order this guide has used throughout:
- Never in Isolation. That campaign's whole value is control. AI Max removes it.
- At most, a test in Exploration. Once the account has reached about 30 qualified leads a month and the broad match campaign from Chapter 6 is running on a target cost per lead, AI Max is a reasonable experiment there, with its own budget and a clear end date.
- Judge it on qualified leads. More conversions from AI Max mean nothing if the sales team doesn't want them.
What a fair B2B test looks like
Say a distributor (a hypothetical example) has run its exact match campaign for eight months and its broad match campaign for three, and the two together produce about 35 qualified leads a month at around $120 each. That account has earned a test. A fair one looks like this:
- Run it in a copy of the broad match campaign, not in place of it, with a budget big enough that it doesn't run out by mid-afternoon.
- Set the end date before it starts, usually six to eight weeks for a B2B account, since a quote request can take weeks to turn into a qualified lead.
- Write down the pass mark first: for example, a cost per qualified lead within 15% of the $120 baseline, with no drop in how many leads the sales team accepts.
If it passes, keep it in that one campaign and keep reading the search terms. If it doesn't, switch it off and leave the exact match campaign alone. Either way, the decision is made on the sales team's numbers, not on the conversion column in Google Ads.
AI Max Picks the Landing Page Itself. A URL Exclusion Keeps B2B Clicks Off Your Careers Page.
If you do test it, set the fences before the first click. Google gives AI Max campaigns several controls:
- URL exclusions. Once Google is choosing landing pages, a B2B site's weakest pages become candidates. URL exclusions are set at the campaign level and only work while text customization and Final URL expansion are on. Exclude the careers page, job listings, the blog and anything else a buyer shouldn't land on. On a B2B site, a careers page full of the same product words as the service pages is exactly the page Google might pick for "cnc machinist."
- Brand controls. You can name the brands your ads should appear with (campaign or ad group level) or the ones they shouldn't (campaign level). Use them to keep a test away from competitors' names and away from searches for your own company, which belong in a brand campaign.
- Text guidelines. Text guidelines, still in beta, let you add up to 25 term exclusions and up to 40 messaging restrictions per campaign. Google notes that term exclusions can't stop it from generating text with prices, so if your prices are quoted rather than published, add the restriction against generating assets with prices.
- The search terms report. AI Max matches show up with their own "AI Max" match type, alongside the headline and landing page Google chose. Read it weekly during a test, the same way Chapter 6 reads the Exploration campaign daily in its first month.
Then compare the test against the account's own baseline: the cost per qualified lead from Isolation and Exploration over the same months. If AI Max brings more form fills and the same or fewer qualified leads, turn it off. That's not a failure of the test. It's the answer.
Next: Job Seekers and Students Type the Same Words as B2B Buyers
Chapter 14 covers lead quality, and why job seekers, students and consumers type the same words as your buyers. Every chapter is listed on the Google Ads for B2B guide home. If you want a second opinion on whether AI Max belongs in your account, see our Google Ads management.
