Nothing looks different. The campaign has the same name it had in August. The keyword list is the same list, and the keywords still sit inside the same square brackets that mean "exact match." The budget did not move. Nobody on your side clicked anything.
And yet, sometime between September 1 and September 30, 2026, Google switched a large number of small business Search campaigns over to AI Max. If your campaign had either of two settings turned on, it now runs on Google's newest layer of automation. That layer decides more of which searches your ad shows for, can write part of what the ad says, and in some setups can pick the page people land on.
Here is the short answer, and then we will walk through each piece. If a Search campaign used automatically created assets (Google now calls this "text customization") or the campaign-level broad match setting, Google upgraded it to AI Max during September. The first group got two features switched on: search term matching and text customization. The second got search term matching. You can confirm it in about five minutes, and you can switch any of it off. What you cannot do is go back to the old settings, because they no longer exist.
The Delay Headlines Were About a Different Campaign
Plenty of owners, and more than a few agencies, relaxed in June. The headlines said Google had delayed the AI Max migration, and that was true. It just was not the whole story.
Google announced the plan on April 15, 2026: three older features would be folded into AI Max starting in September. Those three were Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, and the campaign-level broad match setting. On June 11, after pushback from advertisers worried about disrupting the holiday season, Google updated the announcement. Dynamic Search Ads moved to February 2027. The other two did not move at all. Google's own note on the update says so in one line: campaigns using automatically created assets and the campaign-level broad match setting "will continue to be auto-upgraded starting in September 2026."
So there were two clocks, and most of the coverage only reported one of them. Then the dates arrived quietly:
- August 3, 2026. Google stopped letting anyone create new campaigns with campaign-level broad match or the old automatically created assets, in the interface, in Google Ads Editor and through the API.
- September 1 to 30, 2026. Google migrated the existing campaigns "in place," one account at a time, over the month.
- February 2027. Dynamic Search Ads get the same treatment, with reminder notices going out in January.
There are three reasons you might not have noticed yours. First, nothing new appeared in the account. AI Max is not a campaign type, it is a layer of settings inside the Search campaign you already had, so the campaign list looks exactly as it did. Second, Google set the new switches to "mirror" your old configuration, which is a fair description of the intent and a generous description of the result, as we will get to. Third, the warnings went to whoever holds admin access to the account. If that is an agency you stopped working with two years ago, or an employee's old email address, the notice landed somewhere you will never read it.
Two Settings Decided Whether Google Switched You
This is the only question that matters for the first step: before September, did any of your Search campaigns have either of these turned on?
Automatically created assets. This setting let Google write extra headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads, using your website, your landing pages and your existing ads as raw material. Google renamed it "text customization" and it now lives inside AI Max.
The campaign-level broad match setting. This was a single checkbox that told Google to treat every keyword in the campaign as broad match, whatever match type you had typed in.
How either one got turned on does not matter. You may have done it yourself during setup. A previous agency may have turned it on. A Google rep may have walked you through it on a call, or it may have come in through a recommendation someone accepted from the Recommendations tab. The upgrade did not care who flipped the switch, only that it was on.
Just as useful is knowing what was not upgraded in September:
- Search campaigns built on exact or phrase match keywords with neither setting turned on.
- Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. They were never part of this change.
- Dynamic Search Ads. Their turn comes in February.
If your account is one exact match Search campaign that you built by hand and never let Google write for, there is a good chance nothing changed. "A good chance" is not the same as knowing, which is why the check below is worth the five minutes either way.
Your Keyword Still Says Exact. It Stopped Acting Like It.
This is the heart of the change, and it is different depending on which setting your campaign had. Google's announcement lays out the mapping plainly, and it is worth reading closely, because "mirrors your legacy setup" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
If you had automatically created assets
Your campaign got two AI Max features, and only one of them is what you had before.
Text customization is the old setting under its new name. Google keeps writing headlines and descriptions from your site and your ads. It refreshes them at least every 48 hours, and it only serves one when it predicts that line will beat the ones you wrote. That part genuinely does mirror what you had.
Search term matching is the new part, and it is the big one. It widens your keywords using broad match plus what Google calls keywordless technology, meaning it can match searches based on your landing pages and your ad assets, not only on the words in your keyword list. Your keywords still show their brackets and quotation marks in the account, but in practice they no longer hold the line they used to.
That matters most for exactly the kind of account a careful small business builds. Say you run a water heater company and you bought "[water heater replacement]" as an exact match keyword because those are the searches that turn into $2,000 jobs. You chose exact match on purpose, to stay off "water heater reviews," "how to drain a water heater" and "water heater prices at big box stores." Automatically created assets never changed that decision. The upgrade did. The campaign now has permission to reach for searches your keyword list never named, and the brackets on the screen no longer tell you where that line sits.
A third feature, final URL expansion, lets Google send the click to a different page of your website than the one you chose. Google's announcement does not list it as part of this upgrade path, but check that it is off anyway, for one specific reason. Google's own setup guide says that when final URL expansion is on, pinned headlines are not respected if Google picks a different page. If you pin a headline because it has to appear, like a license number, a required disclosure or a price qualifier, final URL expansion can quietly drop it.
If you had the campaign-level broad match setting
This path changed less. You had already told Google to treat every keyword as broad match, and AI Max's search term matching is where that behavior now lives. The difference is that search term matching also includes the keywordless matching described above, so it can reach a little further than broad match alone. Your ad text is untouched, because text customization was not switched on for this path.
In other words, if you were on campaign-level broad match, you had already made most of this bet. If you were on automatically created assets with tight keywords, Google just made a new one for you.
One more thing applies to both paths. Google's documentation says these AI Max features need a conversion-based Smart Bidding strategy to "function effectively." If your campaign runs on manual bidding, or on a bid strategy that aims for clicks rather than conversions, the upgrade handed you features built for a setup you do not have. That is not a crisis, but it is a strong hint that switching them off costs you very little.
Five Minutes in the Account Tells You If It Happened
You do not need to guess, and you do not need an audit. Google built reporting for AI Max, and every piece of it will tell you, one way or another, whether your campaign changed in September.
- Check the campaign list. Go to Campaigns, open the Settings tab and add the AI Max column, or filter by it. Every Search campaign where AI Max is on will say so. Open any campaign that shows it and look at the AI Max section in its settings to see which features are active.
- Check the search terms. In the search terms report, add the "Source" column and filter the match type to "AI Max." Every search term with that label is a search that came in through the new matching, not through your own keywords. There is also a view called "Search terms and ad combinations" that shows the search, the headline that ran and the page the person landed on, all in one row.
- Check the Keywords report totals. At the bottom of the Keywords report, look for a row called "Total: AI Max expanded matches." That is the spend and the conversions that came from outside your keyword list.
- Check who wrote your headlines. In the asset report, the "Added by" column marks anything Google wrote as "Google AI." If you never wrote a headline and it is serving anyway, this is where you find it.
- Check the landing pages. The landing pages report has a "Selected by" column. Any page marked as selected by AI Max is a page Google chose, not you.
Then do the one comparison that actually answers the question: August against September, for each campaign that was switched. How much of September's spend went to searches labeled "AI Max"? And what did those searches cost per lead, compared with the searches that came in through your own keywords? If the AI Max searches are bringing in leads at a cost you would happily pay, that is useful news. If they are 30% of the spend and none of the leads, you have your answer too. This is the same search terms report we have written about before, the one almost nobody reads, and this month it is worth reading very closely.
Keep It, Fence It, or Switch It Off
There is no single right answer for a whole account, because campaigns do different jobs. Decide campaign by campaign, based on what that campaign is for.
Your brand campaign: switch it off. A campaign built to catch people searching your business name has one job, and widening it only lets it wander into searches that are not about you. It can also make the brand campaign look brilliant by taking credit for customers who were coming to you anyway.
Your money-keyword campaign, built on exact or phrase match: turn search term matching off. This is the campaign that was probably built with the most care, and it is the one the upgrade changed the most. Search term matching can be switched off at the ad group level while the campaign keeps AI Max on, which lets you keep text customization if you like the headlines it writes and still hold your keywords to the matching you chose. If you do not want Google writing any of your ads, switch AI Max off for the whole campaign. We make the same call in our own industry guides, where AI Max never touches the exact match campaign, and the reasons carry over to almost any service business.
A campaign that was already on broad match: keep it, and fence it in. You had already made this bet, and the upgrade changed relatively little. What it deserves now is the guardrails that make broad matching affordable: a negative keyword list that does real work, the same discipline we covered for broad match, plus brand exclusions and URL exclusions so it cannot wander onto your privacy policy page.
An account with only a handful of conversions a month: switch it off. Automation learns from conversions, and a few a month is not enough to learn anything but noise. We have written about how many conversions automation actually needs, and nothing about this upgrade changes that math. It only changed who flipped the switch.
Anything with regulated wording: switch the text features off until the guardrails are in. If you are a law firm, a medical or dental practice, a financial advisor or a licensed trade, a headline Google writes from your website can say something you are not allowed to say. Turn off text customization and final URL expansion first. Turn them back on only after the text guidelines, URL exclusions and brand controls are in place, which our industry guides walk through step by step.
Whatever you decide to keep, write down the condition that would make you turn it off, before you look at the results. Something like: "If the searches AI Max added cost more than $150 per real lead once they have brought in 20 leads, search term matching goes off in this campaign." Put your own numbers in. The point is to decide while you are calm, before a good week or a bad week does the deciding for you.
If you would rather have someone go through the account campaign by campaign and make these calls with you, that is a big part of what our Google Ads management does every month.
Switching It Off Is One Toggle. The Old Settings Are Gone.
The mechanics are simple, and a few details are worth knowing before you touch anything.
- One toggle turns it all off. In the campaign's settings, the AI Max section has a single switch. Turn it off and every AI Max feature in that campaign stops. Google says that if you turn it back on later, it restores the same features you had before.
- Search term matching can be switched per ad group. It only works that way while search term matching is on at the campaign level. The campaign setting is the master switch, and the ad group setting is an override underneath it.
- Turning off text customization removes Google's headlines. Every headline Google wrote is marked "Removed" in the asset report and stops serving. Your own headlines keep running.
- Final URL expansion depends on text customization. Turn text customization off and final URL expansion goes off with it, and your pinned headlines are respected again.
- "Off" does not mean "back to August." The old automatically created assets setting and the campaign-level broad match checkbox cannot be created anymore. Turning AI Max off leaves you with a plain Search campaign, your keywords with the match types you chose and your ads as you wrote them. For most careful small business accounts, that is exactly where you wanted to be anyway.
There is also a second place where Google writes for you, separate from AI Max: account-level automated assets. That is where Google can add sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets and images pulled from your website, even in a campaign with AI Max switched off. You will find it under Assets, in the account-level automated assets settings, and each type has its own switch. If the goal is "Google does not write my ads," check both places.
New Campaigns Start With It On. So Will the Next Change.
Two things are true going forward, and both are worth planning around.
First, AI Max is not only something that happened to old campaigns. Google's setup guide states that new Search campaigns have AI Max turned on by default. Every Search campaign you or anyone else builds from here on will start with Google's automation switched on unless someone turns it off during setup.
Second, this is not a one-time event. Dynamic Search Ads follow in February 2027, and Display campaigns are in the middle of their own move into Demand Gen. We traced the longer pattern when we wrote about Google's new home for Display: every one of these moves is announced as an upgrade, and every one hands a manual control to Google's automation.
None of this means AI Max is bad. Google reports that advertisers using all three AI Max features see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar cost per conversion. Read the fine print, though: that number compares the full feature set against using search term matching alone, for non-retail advertisers. It does not compare AI Max against running without it. For some accounts, especially online stores with clean purchase data, it can earn its place. Our view on when a small business is ready for it has not changed since we wrote why most small businesses should not turn it on yet. What changed is that the decision is no longer yours to make first. It is yours to review.
So build two small habits. Make sure Google's account notices reach you, not a former agency or an inbox nobody opens, which starts with knowing who actually has admin access to your account. And once a quarter, open the settings of every Search campaign and read them top to bottom. It takes ten minutes. The next change Google makes on your behalf will not announce itself any louder than this one did.
We do this for small businesses every day. If you want a second set of eyes on what the upgrade did to your account, we are happy to take a look. If you would rather check it yourself, everything you need is above.
