On July 1, Google updated the terms on your ads account. No email. No banner you had to click. The new terms applied automatically, to every account, including yours.
I read them. Most of it is housekeeping. One clause isn't.
Google's automated systems may format, select, or generate targets, ads, or destinations on your behalf.
Read it slowly. Targets is who sees your ads. Ads is your headlines and descriptions. Destinations is which page on your site the click lands on. That's the whole job. Google now has written permission to do all three without asking first.
WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED
Permission, not capability
Most people are reading this as new power. It isn't. Google could already do all of it. Final URL expansion has been picking destinations for years. Automatically created assets have been writing headlines for longer. The capability isn't new.
What's new is the posture. The terms used to describe tools you switched on. Now they describe what the system does by default. Every one of those settings used to be a decision you made. Today it's a thing you have to go and undo.
That sounds like a small distinction. It decides the outcome of every account nobody audits, which is most of them.
THE COST
Where this shows up in the P&L
I pulled the landing page report on an account doing $2.2M a month in revenue. Not a broken account. Steady 4.0x ROAS, healthy volume, the kind nobody touches.
The landing page report, sorted by cost. This is the screen that shows you where the money actually went.
Landing page taking paid spend | Conversions, 30 days |
|---|---|
Best sellers collection | Converting normally |
Blog post, how to choose | 0 |
Returns policy page | 0 |
Product, out of stock 11 days | 0 |
Three of the top six pages taking spend had produced nothing in a month. Google kept routing paid clicks to all three because all three matched the query. The pages were relevant. They just couldn't take a sale.
Nobody noticed because the top line looked fine. Clicks up, impressions up, dashboard green. You only see it when you pull the landing page report, and by then you've funded a month of it.
WHAT WE DID
Seven days, no new budget
We switched final URL expansion off, split the asset groups that were doing two jobs at once, and pruned the queries draining spend with no conversion pattern behind them. No new creative. No extra budget.
The same account, marked up. Every circle is a setting that was on by default and shouldn't have been.
+18%
revenue in 7 days, $2.2M/month account, flat spend
That's +$396,000 a month on the same budget. ROAS moved 4.0x to 4.72x.
Nobody adds budget to a leaking bucket. We patched the bucket, and the same spend paid 18% more.
DO THIS WEEK
Four settings, in this order
Final URL expansion. Off. On every Search and AI Max campaign, unless you can name the exact pages you want it using. This is the one that costs real money.
Brand controls. Set them. Once query matching expands, you get matched to brand searches you never chose, yours and your competitors'. Name the brands you want in and the ones you want out, or the model picks for you.
Landing page report, 30 days, sorted by cost. Any page with spend and zero conversions is a leak, not a test.
Audit your automatically created assets. Google writes headlines off whatever your landing pages say today, and you're accountable for copy you didn't write. Read what's live before a customer does.
That's an afternoon. On a mid-size account it's usually the highest-paid afternoon of the quarter.
ZOOM OUT
This is the pattern, not an event
Performance Max replaced Smart Shopping. Demand Gen replaced Video Action. AI Max is now absorbing Dynamic Search Ads, and on July 24 it landed on Standard Shopping too. The terms just caught up to all of it.
What the machine now decides, and the four inputs it still cannot see.
The direction has never once reversed. So stop fighting it. Let the machine do the matching, and keep an iron grip on the inputs it cannot see: the feed, the landing pages, the profit signal you hand the bidder, the negatives. Get those right and the automation is a tailwind. Leave them to Google and it's a slow leak that reaches your P&L long before it reaches your dashboard.
Free. Every setting this change touches, in the order to check them.
Not sure which of your pages are taking spend and returning nothing? Reply with your biggest campaign and I'll tell you where to look. Just hit reply.
Talk soon,
Patrick