On April 15, Google made a decision about your account that you never got a vote on. Most advertisers still haven't noticed. By September, they won't have a choice.
Let me catch you up, because a lot moved while this newsletter was quiet, and this is the change that's going to hit the most accounts the fastest. Google confirmed that AI Max for Search is replacing Dynamic Search Ads. Not as a beta. Not as an opt-in you can quietly ignore. AI Max exited beta on April 15, automatic upgrades begin rolling out in September, and Dynamic Search Ads are scheduled to sunset entirely by February 2027. If you run DSA today, this is arriving on your account whether you raise your hand or not.
I've spent the last few months with AI Max live across real accounts, real budgets, and real margins on the line. It isn't a gimmick. In the right setup it's a genuine step up. In the wrong setup it's a fast, confident way to spend your money in places you'd never have chosen. The gap between those two outcomes comes down entirely to what you do in the next few weeks. So let's get you ready.
Google's own framing of the switch. The word doing the heavy lifting is “upgrade.” For most accounts it's closer to a transplant. (Source: Google)
START HERE
What Google actually changed
Dynamic Search Ads worked by crawling your website and matching your ads to searches based on what was on your pages. Crude, but you kept a fence around it: which pages it could use, which themes, a defined shape you controlled. AI Max takes the fence down and hands the whole thing to Gemini.
Now the model decides which searches you appear on, rewrites your headlines on the fly to match the query, and chooses which landing page each click lands on. More reach, more automation, and a great deal less of you in the loop. When it activates, three things switch on at once, and they are not equally safe.
Search-term matching. Google matches your ads to queries well beyond your keywords. Mostly upside, as long as someone is actually reading the search-term report and pruning it.
Text customisation. Gemini generates and rewrites headlines to fit each query. Useful, but it will now say things about your brand you didn't write, which is why the brand-safety controls suddenly matter.
Final-URL expansion. Google sends the click to whichever page on your site it judges most relevant. This is the one that quietly drains money, and almost nobody turns it off in time.
Google's side-by-side of DSA against AI Max. Read how much of the new column is the machine deciding, not you specifying. (Source: Google)
THE TRADE
The 27% is real. So is the leak.
I'm not here to talk you out of AI Max. The numbers are real, and in some accounts they're very good.
+27%
typical lift on keyword-heavy Search campaigns
Google's own figure for accounts still leaning on exact and phrase match. Broader accounts see closer to +14% more conversions at a similar CPA. Both are believable. Neither is automatic.
If your Search has been starved on tight keyword lists, AI Max will find real demand you've been leaving on the table, and it will do it faster than a human ever could. That's the honest case for it, and it's a good one.
Here's the catch, and it's the part the announcement skips. The same engine finding you that new revenue is also free to spend your budget in places you would never have picked, and it starts doing that on day one, before you've seen a single report. Picture your best-selling product going out of stock for a week. With final-URL expansion left on, Google doesn't know and doesn't care. It keeps sending paid clicks to that dead page because the page still matches the query. You pay for every one of those clicks, and not one of them can convert.
AI Max doesn't break accounts because it's dumb. It breaks them because it's confident, fast, and pointed at the wrong page.
THE DANGEROUS SWITCH
Why final-URL expansion is the one to watch
Of the three switches, final-URL expansion is where I've watched genuinely good accounts bleed. Left on, Google will happily route a paid click to your blog post, your returns policy, a collection page that's half sold out, an out-of-stock product, or a thin category that was never built to sell. The algorithm optimised for relevance to the search, not for whether that page can actually take a sale.
The damage is invisible at first because the top-line still looks fine. Clicks are up, impressions are up, the dashboard is green. It's only when you pull the landing-page report a month later that you see a third of your spend went to pages that have never closed a sale in their life. By then you've funded a month of it. This is the single setting I'd check before anything else.
ZOOM OUT
This is the pattern now, not a one-off
AI Max isn't an isolated update. It's the shape of everything Google ships now: more of the account run by Gemini, fewer levers exposed to you, and defaults that quietly favour spend over control. Demand Gen did it to social-style campaigns. Performance Max did it to Shopping. AI Max is doing it to Search. The direction never reverses.
The operators who win the next two years aren't the ones fighting that current. They're the ones who let the machine do the matching and keep an iron grip on the inputs the machine can't see: the feed, the landing pages, the profit signal you feed the bidder, the negatives. Get those right and AI Max is a tailwind. Leave them to Google and it's a slow leak you won't notice until the P&L does.
DO THIS FIRST
Your pre-September playbook
You don't need to fear this update. You need to meet it on your terms before Google sets the terms for you. Here's exactly what I'd do over the next two weeks, in order.
Turn AI Max on in one campaign, not the whole account. Treat it as a controlled test, not a switch you flip everywhere.
Turn off final-URL expansion, or tightly constrain it. Exclude every URL you never want paid traffic on: blog, returns, account, cart, anything out of stock.
Set your brand-safety and text guidelines so Gemini can't write copy that misrepresents you or invents claims.
Watch the search-term report daily for the first two weeks and add negatives like it's 2019 again. The early junk is where the budget escapes.
Only once the test campaign holds its CPA do you expand AI Max to the rest of Search, one campaign at a time.
Most of that overlaps with the audit we run on every new account in week one. We put the 21-point version into a template you can run on your own account, free, no opt-in required.
The 21-point Search & PMax audit checklist
The same first-week checklist we run internally, including the URL-expansion and negative-keyword checks that keep AI Max honest. Normally part of a $1,000 audit.
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE
Control while the machine scales
Done right, handing the matching to AI Max while you hold the inputs isn't a compromise. It's how you scale without the wheels coming off. We ran exactly this play on an account that needed to grow fast without resetting its performance.
2.86x ROAS, while spend grew 45x
From €664 to €31K a month, ROAS up not down
Same brand, same products. We let Google's automation do the heavy lifting on matching and bidding, and kept a tight hold on structure, feed, and the profit signal. December ROAS came in higher than where we started, on 45 times the spend.
That's the whole game now. Hand over the busywork. Never hand over the judgement. AI Max is going to make that distinction the difference between accounts that compound and accounts that quietly leak, and the gap opens in September.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your account before the auto-upgrade hits, that's exactly what a call is for. Fifteen minutes, I'll tell you whether AI Max is likely to help or hurt your specific setup, and what to lock down first.
Prefer to keep it short? Tell me your monthly Search spend and whether you're on DSA today, and I'll reply with the one thing I'd change first. Just hit reply.
P.S. We rebuilt one client's entire Search structure around this exact logic and held ROAS while spend climbed. The full teardown, with the numbers, is in the case-study library.
Talk soon,
Patrick
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