One HVAC company in our Indianapolis sample runs ads for a $49 tune-up. Its paid landing page says $49 too. Its main website says $59.
That's a common kind of drift, and when a person writes the ads it's mostly harmless. The person knows which price is current, keeps the ad and the landing page in step, and fixes the website when someone notices.
AI Max changes that. It's a Google feature that, among other things, writes ad text from your website. If the website says $59 and the ad says $49, it's no longer obvious which one a homeowner will see. Below: the three things AI Max does, its spot at the very end of an HVAC rollout, and the controls that keep it from quoting a stale tune-up price or landing a furnace search on the wrong page.
AI Max Comes Last in an HVAC Account, After Broad Match Has Proven Itself on Booked Jobs.
AI Max for Search campaigns lives inside the Search campaign you already have, as three switches:
- Search term matching reaches past your furnace and AC keywords, using broad match plus the wording on your ads and pages to find related searches.
- Text customization, which generates extra headlines and descriptions from your website and your existing ads.
- Final URL expansion may swap the furnace repair page you picked for another page on your domain that Google's systems rate as a closer fit.
That's the switch Chapter 9 had you uncheck on day one, because Google ships every new Search campaign with it on. And by Google's own account, these switches only work properly when the campaign bids toward conversions with Smart Bidding. In practice that means an account that already bids on booked jobs with Target CPA.
Put those facts together and AI Max's place in the rollout is clear. It's broad match plus automated writing plus automated landing pages. An HVAC account adds it at the very end: after exact match has set the cost of a booked job, after broad match has proven it can find new furnace and AC work at that cost (Chapter 6), and after Performance Max and Demand Gen have had their turn. It never goes into an account still running only exact match.
Five of 12 HVAC Sites Priced a Tune-Up or Service Call One Way in Their Ads and Another on the Site.
When we profiled the 12 Indianapolis HVAC websites behind this guide, we compared each company's live ads with its own pages. Five of them priced a tune-up, evaluation or service call differently in the two places:
- A $49 tune-up in the ads and on the paid landing page, $59 on the main website.
- A $49 AC or furnace evaluation in the ads, a $29 furnace evaluation coupon on the site.
- A $0 service call in the ads, a $129 standard service call on the site ($99 for new customers, waived only on repairs over $399), plus a $79 furnace tune-up ad against $89 on the site's schedule.
- A $69 tune-up in the ads, a $49 new-customer tune-up on the paid landing page.
- An $89 heating inspection in the ads, $89.95 on the site.
Two more companies ran ad offers, a big system discount in one case and a $26.95 AC fix in another, that we couldn't find anywhere on their websites.
Most of these mismatches have an ordinary cause. A seasonal coupon goes into an ad in April, the website's coupon page still shows last fall's number, and the paid landing page was built by whoever set up the campaign and never touched again. Nobody owns the price across all three places.
None of this is unusual. Coupons change by season, landing pages get built for one campaign and forgotten, and the main site lags behind both. With people writing the ads, it's a cleanup job. With AI Max writing from the website, the website becomes a source, and every stale price on it is a candidate for an ad.
AI Max Reads Your Landing Pages for Ad Copy. A Stale Coupon on the Site Can Become a Live Headline.
Text customization starts from what you've already given it. Google says it lifts short snippets from the page title, the page description and the meta tags of your landing pages, and mixes in your current ads and keywords. The generated assets are reviewed and refreshed at least every 48 hours, and if a landing page changes, the assets follow within 48 hours.
That cuts both ways. Fix a price on the site and the ads catch up within two days. Leave last spring's "$69 AC Tune-Up" on a forgotten page and AI Max may have it to work with.
So before AI Max goes on, clean the site the way you'd clean a furnace before a heating season:
- One price per service. The tune-up costs the same on the home page, the landing page, the coupon page and the ads.
- Expired offers gone. Remove last season's coupons, not just the links to them.
- Terms on the page. If the $0 service call only applies with a repair over a certain amount, say so where the offer appears.
- Page titles and descriptions that say the job. They're among the first things AI Max reads.
A "$" Term Exclusion Won't Stop AI Max From Writing a Price. A Messaging Restriction Will.
Google gives you a way to steer the writing, called text guidelines, currently in beta. They apply at the campaign level to the text AI Max generates, and they come in two kinds.
Term exclusions block exact words or phrases. You can add up to 25 per campaign, and they aren't case sensitive. Use them for words you never want in an HVAC ad: a competitor's name, "free" if you don't offer anything free, a service you don't do.
Messaging restrictions block an idea rather than a word, and prices are the clearest case. Google's help page makes the point with a shoe ad: blocking the dollar sign as a term does nothing to stop a generated line that quotes a shoe price. A messaging restriction telling AI Max not to write prices is the setting Google points to instead.
Restrictions read better to Google's system with a sample attached. For an HVAC company that might read: "Don't generate assets with prices, e.g. $49 tune-up or $0 service call." And the guidelines aren't only forward-looking: Google says they also apply to the generated assets already running.
If your ads should mention a price, write that headline yourself, from the price you've checked, and keep generated text price-free.
Before you opt in, look at what it would write. Google offers asset previews: sample text that AI Max would generate for your campaign, shown during setup in the asset optimization section, so you can check it against your guidelines before anything runs. Read every sample the way a homeowner would. If one says something your techs can't back up, a same-day promise on a Saturday or a brand you don't install, add a restriction and look again. If the previews still read like any HVAC company in any city, your website probably does too, and that's the page to rewrite first.
Final URL Expansion Can Send a Furnace Search to the Plumbing Page. URL Exclusions Close That Door.
Final URL expansion is the AI Max feature that picks a different landing page on your domain when Google expects it to perform better. It's enabled by default when you turn on AI Max, and it depends on text customization: turn text customization off and final URL expansion turns off with it.
For a multi-trade shop, the risk is the same one Chapter 10 described for Performance Max. The plumbing pages, the electrical pages, the careers page and the blog all live on the same domain as the furnace repair page.
Google's control is URL exclusions: name the pages, or rules for pages, that AI Max should never send traffic to. For an HVAC campaign, that list usually includes:
- Every plumbing, drain, water heater and electrical page.
- Careers, financing applications and the employee portal.
- Blog posts and how-to articles, which answer questions instead of booking jobs.
- Old campaign landing pages with expired offers.
Check the list again whenever the website adds pages. A new water heater page or a seasonal promotion page can become a landing page candidate once it's live, unless an exclusion rule already covers it.
The Search Terms Report Labels What AI Max Bought. Read It Before You Trust the Totals.
Once AI Max is on, Google adds "AI Max" as a match type in the search terms report for the searches it reached beyond your keywords, along with the headlines and landing pages it used. That's the place to judge it, because it shows exactly which homeowner searches AI Max paid for and which page each one landed on.
Read those rows the way Chapter 6 read broad match: daily at first, adding job seekers, do-it-yourselfers and other trades to the negative list. Then judge the whole thing on booked jobs, using the tracking from Chapter 1. If total booked furnace and AC jobs don't rise, or the cost per booked job jumps, AI Max is mostly re-buying searches the rest of the account already had.
Next: Heating and Cooling Peak Six Months Apart. Give Each Its Own Campaign So the Budget Follows the Weather.
AI Max now has its place: last in line, switched on only after the account is booking jobs through every other stage, writing from a website you've cleaned, kept away from prices and pages you didn't approve, and judged on booked jobs. Chapter 12 covered Local Services and Maps, Chapter 11 Demand Gen, Chapter 10 Performance Max, Chapter 9 the launch settings, Chapter 8 the ads, Chapter 7 the bids, Chapter 6 the two Search stages, Chapter 5 the keywords, Chapter 4 the ad groups, Chapter 3 the job values, Chapter 2 the order to buy searches in, and Chapter 1 the tracking. Chapter 14 covers seasonal budgets.
The full rollout, from tracking to seasonal budgets, maintenance plans and new-system ads, is on the guide's home page.
For HVAC companies on our Google Ads management, AI Max waits until every tune-up and service-call price on the website matches the ads, and the no-prices restriction is in place before Google writes a single headline. Considering it yourself? Search your own website for every dollar sign, and make sure each one is a price you'd put in an ad today.
