This month Google Ads starts writing its own targeting, and nobody has to click yes

If you advertise on Google, there is a reasonable chance your account changed type last week and nobody told you in a way you would have noticed.

From 1 September, Google is automatically upgrading Search campaigns that use automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting into a different campaign type called AI Max. Google's own wording to advertisers is that these campaigns "will automatically be upgraded". There is no button to press and no decision to make.

What is actually happening, and what is not

Half the marketing industry spent the summer writing that Dynamic Search Ads die in September. That was true in April and it is not true now. Google pushed the Dynamic Search Ads sunset back to February 2027, in an update to its own announcement dated 11 June, after advertisers said they needed longer.

What it did not push back was this bit. Two settings stayed on the September timetable:

Automatically created assets. Google writes headlines and descriptions for you, based on your website and existing ads.
The campaign-level broad match setting. Every keyword in the campaign is treated as broad match.

Campaigns using either are being moved. Where automatically created assets were on, the upgraded campaign gets AI Max search term matching and text customisation switched on by default. Where it was the broad match setting, it gets search term matching on by default.

So if you read that you had until 2027, you were reading about the other half of the change.

Neither of those settings felt like a decision

This is why it is worth a post rather than a footnote.

Almost nobody sat down and chose automatically created assets. It appears as a recommendation with a helpful tick next to it, or it was on when the account was built, or somebody accepted an optimisation score suggestion three years ago because the account was nagging and the box was green. The campaign-level broad match setting has the same history.

Neither of them announces itself as a strategic position. Both of them are now the reason a campaign has been converted into something else.

The accounts most likely to be affected are the ones nobody has opened in a while. A small firm's Google Ads account is very often set up once by an agency or a freelancer, tuned for a month, and then left running on a card that gets charged monthly. That account has been quietly following Google's recommendations ever since, because the recommendations are what it is shown.

This is not automatically a bad thing

The reflex among people who do this for a living is to treat every Google automation as a tax. That is a pose, and it is wrong often enough to be worth resisting.

Google's published figure is that AI Max campaigns see on average 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar cost per acquisition, when the full feature set is used, compared with search term matching alone. Read the small print with it: that is Google's own internal data from 2026, for non-retail advertisers, and it is a comparison between two AI Max configurations rather than between AI Max and what you were running. Take it as a direction of travel, not a forecast for your account.

For plenty of small advertisers this will be fine, and for some it will be better than what they had, because what they had was a keyword list somebody wrote in 2021 for a service the business no longer leads with.

What the change actually costs you is specificity

When a system chooses the queries and writes the headlines, the controls you keep matter more than the ones you lost.

Four are worth your attention. Your negative keyword list, which is now doing considerably more work than it was: broader matching means more chances to pay for the wrong search, and negatives are how you say no. Brand and location controls, which AI Max has and which are worth setting rather than leaving open. Text guidelines, which constrain what the system may write in your name. And the landing pages, because final URL expansion can decide that a different page answers the search better than the one you picked.

Then there is the fifth one, which matters more than the other four together.

The conversion definition is now the steering wheel

Every automated bidding system optimises toward whatever you have told it counts as success. That has always been true. What changes with a broader matching system is the speed and the reach with which it acts on your answer.

Get that definition wrong and the machine will pursue the wrong thing faithfully, across a much wider set of searches than before, using your money.

Wrong is more common than people expect in small accounts. Conversions defined as a page view of the contact page rather than a submitted form. Every phone call counted, including the wrong numbers and the supplier ringing back. A thank-you page firing twice. A form that counts on load rather than on send. Any of those tells Google that something cheap and plentiful is what you want, and Google will go and get you more of it.

If your traffic and your conversion count both rise this autumn and your diary does not, that is the mechanism.

01Open the account and check whether the campaigns now say AI Max
02Look at what is defined as a conversion, and whether you would call each one a genuine enquiry
03Read the search terms report weekly for a month, not monthly
04Add negatives for the ones that were never your customer

A month of that is enough to know whether the upgrade helped you or is quietly widening the net. It is dull work and it is the whole job.

Ask your agency the awkward version

If somebody runs this for you, the useful question is not whether they are AI Max ready. Everyone will say yes.

Ask them what your account counts as a conversion, and whether they would describe each one as a real enquiry. Then ask what changed in the account since 1 September, and what they have added to the negative list as a result. An answer that names specifics is a good sign. An answer about embracing AI-powered growth is somebody's marketing copy.

We report on search and digital marketing for clients, so this is our own reporting we are describing, not someone else's. We have argued before that the panic about AI and local search is pointed at the wrong thing, and the same applies here. The interesting question was never whether the machine writes your ads. It is what you told the machine to want.

If you would like someone to look at what your account is currently being rewarded for, that is a short piece of work and usually a revealing one.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.