Google Ads AI Max Upgrades September 1st: What You Need To Know

The DSA migration to AI Max was delayed, but a different deadline on September 1st is already here, and your campaigns may be affected right now. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy cuts through the confusion around Google's AI Max rollout, explaining exactly which campaigns are being auto-upgraded in September. Those using campaign-level broad match settings or automatically created assets, why the delayed DSA headlines gave many advertisers a false sense of security, and what AI Max's URL expansion and text customisation features actually do in practice. 

Learn what to audit in your account before the upgrade happens, why Jeremy's agency has seen strong results from text customisation but not from final URL expansion, and why proactively migrating now could give you a competitive edge before the February 2027 DSA deadline lands. 

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

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AI Max, AI Max, AI Max. Everyone is talking about Max and Google loves to slap a bit of Max on top of anything that they are publishing. And a couple of months ago, there was talk about um AI Max being automatically applied to dynamic search ads. This was then actually delayed um to February 2027. Back in June, this this was announced. But there is actually different clock running as well and um there is a change that is happening on the 1st of September that you will want to pay attention to and it may affect your campaigns. May not your DSA campaigns, but it may affect your campaigns and will create a bit of urgency that you will have to react to. So, welcome back to Google Ads Unleashed. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this wonderful Monday. So today I want to talk about what is actually going to happen to some of your campaigns in the coming weeks and months. Uh because one deadline is actually on the 1st of September. The next one is in February of 2027. Um this there's going to be five parts to this uh episode. So I'm going to just try and paint the broader picture and what this means for your ad account. So part one, the original plan, what was actually going on and why are there now two deadlines. So, first of all, in April 2026 of this year, um, basically Google announced that three features, legacy features would be automatically upgraded to AIAX in se this September in 2026. Dynamic search ads, automatically created assets since it's been renamed to text customization, and the campaign level broad match setting. So, obviously, were panicking then already because they didn't know what it meant. It was a new campaign type or campaign feature that people haven't heard of. Uh but Google actually backpedalled then in June and actually pushed the DSA suns setting and the auto upgrade back to 2027. The reason is because advertisers were feeding back that uh this is significantly going to disrupt the Q4. Um and of course DSA still actually had a valid spot and I've done loads of podcasts about IC search ads and I still think they shouldn't really go but there we are. Um and Google's own management then actually said you know what um screw it we're actually going to push it back now to February 2027 and that is where the auto migration is going to start for DSA campaigns or even hybrid campaigns if you have DSA as only an ad group within uh a campaign. Okay. Uh but what they also said in the same breath which is not something that a lot of people know is that um on the 1st of September they would auto upgrade for any campaign that uh was using text customization um so formally um automatically created assets and campaign level broad match settings. Okay. So if you actually have any campaigns which are using this it will be upgraded to AIAX as of tomorrow. Uh I think this episode comes out on the 31st of August. If it doesn't Mia Kulpa um And I think Google wanted to um want to have this all concluded by uh throughout uh September. Okay. So if you saw the delay headlines and relaxed, you may be exactly wrong about what is actually going to happen. Um and I do think that the communication about this has actually been really really bad because a lot of people just said the AIAX migration has been delayed and that is wrong because it's already happening in September for a subset of campaigns. So part two, are you actually affected? So first of all, are you running only DSA campaigns? You're not affected. This is going to happen in February. So you've got plenty of time to set this up. Uh there are some settings that you may want to check. Uh first of all, campaign level broad match. Um whether you have that on. Uh not broad match keywords generally because sometimes you run them by choice, but the campaign setting that converts all keywords to broad match. If that's on, uh the upgrade is uh happening in September. Okay. Next check is whether you have automatically created assets text customization on um that will also um be automatically upgraded. DSA won't be upgraded and any other standard search campaigns they will also not be upgraded. So that is absolutely fine. Okay. So uh check that now in your ad accounts all of your search campaigns and see whether that um is something that uh is happening to you. All right, part number three. What the f*** is AIMAX? I've done an episode on this and its features, but essentially what it does is um it upgrades two features on your um existing search campaigns. Number one, it actually replaces the final URL uh very much DSA like with what it thinks will be the best landing page of your entire site map unless you've excluded certain uh um URLs with uh in in the ad and the final URL sending people maybe to like product pages or other collection pages of which it thinks that they will be better. And the second thing is asset customization or text customization based on search history, the actual search term um your assets in the account. So call outs blah blah blah other headlines descriptions and so on and landing page content. And actually that's a feature that I really really like and has really done fantastically well for a lot of our accounts. I've done an episode about why that is and what it does. Go back and listen to it if you haven't already. Okay. You still of course have some controls like brand restrictions, URL inclusion, exclusion, search term reporting, asset removal, all that sort of stuff. But uh essentially um it's uh a mechanism for appearing um in AI overviews further down the line and uh to focus yourself more on creating and uh to make use of more sort of features that um Google actually sort of relies on in order to deliver ads to the right people and deliver more attractive formats. Okay, part four. Is this actually working? From our experience, it's working pretty good. Uh AI Max certain features have been actually really good. Overall, however, we've noticed that when we have the final URL expansion part on that it's s*** the bed every single time. So, So, Google reports that AI Maxer search campaigns see an average of 7% or more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or rorowass when using the full feature suite compared to standalone search term matching alone. Okay. Um, independent numbers however I found. So, I found uh the study online that's had a look at 250 retail campaigns that are using AIAX and it actually was delivering conversions at roughly 35% lower rowass than traditional match types. So this is quite sort of normal for any kind of new feature that Google's testing. For instance, broad used to be terrible. Now it's pretty good depending on the campaign, depending on the ad account. Um there are loads of other features. Smart bidding when it came out was terrible. Now it's the standard and it's really good and better than manual bidding. Um but essentially there is a lot of um justified skepticism for some of the new stuff. that Google brings on just because um it's not always uh um really the sort of yeah feature that really works and it doesn't always actually uh return the positive returns that Google claims. Um it's all uh pushed towards sort of the AI side of things. So it's just something to um be mindful of to be that you have to know and then test for yourself. Okay. Right. Um so So what is actually now happening part five and this is I love it it's like a big drama um uh after the catastrophe here is the solution uh in number five what is actually happening now so if you're in the September wave with the campaign level broad match and the automatically created assets audit everything now decide per campaign and if you want to migrate or do something completely different if you're running DSA run some tests now if you want um I would probably uh proactively migrate it now because um in German there's a wonderful saying so I'm half German so I speak German it says which wonderfully translates in English to it's better to have an ending with horror than never ending horror right because it's going to happen anyway so you may as well uh switch whilst you can uh you can maybe run a campaign experiment you can uh switch it proactively I would probably not wait until January to be honest with you uh even if it's for even if etc. you may even have a competitive advantage if it works for you as well. Um yeah the migration is a very clear signal for where Google is heading right fewer manual levers more AIdriven expansion um and quite frankly adoption timelines which don't wait for whether you want it or not it's just going to happen and either way and I think the advertisers who will come out ahead are those who are going to aggressively adopt and test not the ones that are steering away from it for as long as possible. And if you want some aggressive lead and some aggressive help, that is what we're there for. Jeremy at young andigital.mmarketing. Head to the website youngdigital.marketing. You can book a one-to-one with me. You can book training. You can also book us as an agency to run your Google ads for you. If you are confused about all the changes that are going on, you can also simply write me at Jeremy Young Google Ads on LinkedIn. and I'm happy to respond to you there. Many thanks for listening. I wish you a happy and productive week ahead and I see you in the next episode.