Google began automatically upgrading Search campaigns to AI Max on 1 September 2026. The migration runs through to 30 September and rolls out gradually, so if you looked on the first of the month and saw nothing, that is not evidence you were spared.
Here is what was actually migrated, what was not, and the audit worth running in your account this week.
Which Campaigns Were Migrated?
Two things, and only two things:
- Campaigns using Automatically Created Assets (ACA). These upgrade to AI Max with search term matching and text customisation enabled.
- Campaigns using the campaign-level broad match setting. These upgrade to AI Max with search term matching only.
Google notified affected advertisers by email on 5 August 2026 and published the technical mechanics on its Ads Developer Blog on 12 August. Existing brand inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically. Google says all eligible upgrades should conclude by the end of September.
Creation of new campaign-level broad match and legacy ACA configurations was switched off on 3 August 2026 across the Google Ads interface, Ads Editor and the API. The practical consequence is useful: the population of affected campaigns was frozen a month before the migration, so it is a finite, countable list rather than a moving target.
Dynamic Search Ads Were Not Part of This
This is where a lot of the commentary in the past week has been wrong, and it matters because it sends people looking for a problem they do not have while ignoring one they do.
Dynamic Search Ads were originally bundled into the September 2026 migration when Google announced the transition on 15 April 2026. On 11 June, Google split the timeline and moved DSAs to February 2027, citing advertiser feedback about the risk of disrupting the fourth quarter. That extension applied to DSAs alone. The date for ACA and campaign-level broad match never moved.
So if you were running Dynamic Search Ads on 1 September, Google did not migrate them. Your timeline looks like this instead:
- September 2026: in-account notices begin, encouraging voluntary DSA migration.
- 15 January 2027: reminder notifications to advertisers still running legacy DSAs.
- January 2027: the ability to create new DSA ad groups is permanently removed.
- 1 to 28 February 2027: automatic migration of remaining DSA campaigns.
We wrote about this split in detail in our earlier piece on the two AI Max deadlines, and the two-clock framing still holds. One clock has now run out. The other has about five months left.
⚡ The practical read: accounts running both ACA and DSAs need two separate plans, not one. The September migration has already happened to part of your account. The February one is still yours to control, and controlling it is worth more than reacting to it.
Was Final URL Expansion Switched On?
Probably not, and this is worth checking rather than assuming in either direction.
AI Max has three components: search term matching, text customisation (the new name for automatically created assets) and Final URL expansion, which lets Google substitute a different page from your site when it judges that page a better match for the query. Final URL expansion is the one that alarms people, because it means traffic landing on pages you did not nominate.
The auto-upgrades were configured to mirror your legacy setup, which means they enabled search term matching, plus text customisation for ACA campaigns. Final URL expansion was not part of that mapping. However, two things are true at once and both deserve attention:
- Final URL expansion is on by default when you create a new Search campaign, because AI Max itself is now the default setting for new Search campaigns. Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin attributed that default to testing showing campaigns reached their first conversion faster in the first two weeks after launch.
- Final URL expansion requires text customisation to be enabled. Migrated ACA campaigns now have text customisation on, which puts them one toggle away rather than two.
Open the campaign settings and read what is actually enabled. Do not infer it from a blog post, including this one.
The Tracking Template Trap
If you do turn Final URL expansion on, check your tracking templates first. Final URL expansion substitutes advertiser-provided URLs with dynamically selected landing pages, and where a tracking template appends parameters in a way that is not compatible with those dynamic URLs, the result is a 404. Google's own documentation flags this. Verify that a dynamically expanded landing page resolves correctly with your tracking parameters attached before you enable the setting, not after you notice the conversion rate falling.
What Changed in Your Reporting
The migration brought reporting changes that matter more than most people realise, because they are the only way to tell AI Max traffic apart from keyword traffic after the fact.
- A search term match source segment. Search terms now carry a value distinguishing keyword-driven traffic from AI Max broad match and keywordless matching. This is the first time a mainstream Search reporting surface labels traffic that originated from no keyword at all.
- New report views covering search term and ad combinations, and expanded landing pages carrying the expanded final URL.
- A campaign-level field recording whether AI Max is enabled.
If your reporting buckets spend by keyword, the keywordless bucket is the one that will quietly grow. Anyone running scripts, bid tools or reporting pipelines built against the legacy broad match and ACA entities needs an update plan, because Google Ads API versions released after 1 September drop support for them. Our conversion tracking guide covers the measurement groundwork this depends on.
What Google Says About Performance, and What Others Found
Google reports that campaigns using the full AI Max feature suite see an average of around 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS, compared with using search term matching alone. That is a specific, narrow claim: full suite versus search term matching only, not AI Max versus a well-run keyword campaign.
Independent results have been considerably more mixed, including reported testing across a large set of retail campaigns that recorded a substantial ROAS decline. We would treat both numbers as directional rather than predictive. The honest position is that AI Max performance depends heavily on the quality of the conversion signal you feed it, because the automation scales whatever your conversions reward. A soft or duplicated conversion action does not just produce a slightly worse result, it produces a confidently worse one, faster.
The Audit to Run This Week
In rough order of value:
- Confirm what was migrated. Check which Search campaigns now have AI Max enabled and which specific features are switched on. Do this per campaign, not per account.
- Harden your conversion actions. Make sure what you are counting reflects genuine business value, and remove soft or duplicate actions before the wider matching scales them.
- Refresh negative keywords. Broader matching finds queries your existing exclusion list was never written for. Exclude irrelevant services, locations, customer types and research-stage intent.
- Set brand controls. Configure brand inclusions and exclusions at campaign and ad group level so the automation cannot bid against, or on behalf of, brands you do not want associated with your ads.
- Write text guidelines. If text customisation is on, give it your brand rules and term exclusions rather than letting it infer them from your site.
- Read the search terms weekly. Use the new match source segment so you can see what is arriving from keywordless matching specifically.
- Set a baseline properly. Compare year on year and segment by match source. September is a strong month for a lot of Australian categories, and raw month-on-month growth will happily tell you AI Max is working when what actually happened is that it is September. This is the single easiest way to draw the wrong conclusion from real data.
The Bottom Line
If your account used automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting, AI Max is on now and there was no opt-out. Your remaining control is over the inputs: conversion quality, negatives, brand controls, creative guidelines and URL settings.
If you run Dynamic Search Ads, nothing happened to them in September, and you have until February 2027 to migrate on your own terms. Doing that during a quiet period with a clean baseline is a materially better experience than having it done for you during a busy one. Our Google Ads guide covers the account fundamentals that make either transition survivable, and our piece on AI in paid ads sets out how we think about steering automation generally.
Sources: Google Ads & Commerce Blog, "Dynamic Search Ads are upgrading to AI Max" (15 April 2026, updated 11 June 2026); Google Ads Developer Blog, migration guidance (12 August 2026); Google Ads Help Centre, "Set up AI Max for Search campaigns" and "How AI Max for Search campaigns works"; Search Engine Land, AI Max migration timeline (August 2026). Figures verified against primary Google documentation where available.
Nauman has spent more than 15 years in digital marketing across Australia, the UAE and Pakistan, working in-house and agency-side before founding DigiWolf. He holds an MBA in Finance & Marketing from the Institute of Business Administration, and works directly with every DigiWolf client on AI search, SEO and paid media strategy.