On 1 September Google started moving campaigns into AI Max. Some of yours may already be there.
Search campaigns that used the campaign level broad match setting, or Automatically Created Assets, are being upgraded automatically. Nobody asked you to approve it. Google sent an email in August, and a few weeks later the campaign you built started running under new rules.
We already covered why this is happening and which levers you should never hand over. This is the follow up, where you open the account and check what changed.
Start there, because the headline metrics can mislead you.
Cost per lead might drop. Conversion volume might climb. Neither number tells you whether the new leads are people you want, or whether the ads now say things you would never sign off on.
The short version of the audit: open campaign settings, then the search terms report, then the landing page report, then the asset report. After that, judge the migration on qualified leads and revenue. Cost per conversion comes last. The full walkthrough is below.
Step one. Confirm what migrated, and what got switched on
Go to Campaigns, then Settings, and open the AI Max section on every Search campaign. Any campaign showing AI Max as on that nobody on your team enabled is one Google moved. Change history, filtered to September, should give you the date.
Write them down. Skip this and you end up comparing a migrated campaign with one that was never touched, then drawing the wrong conclusion about both.
AI Max has three parts: search term matching, text customisation and final URL expansion. The migration does not switch on all of them. According to Google, broad match campaigns come across with search term matching only. Campaigns that used Automatically Created Assets get search term matching plus text customisation. Final URL expansion is not part of the default for either.
So record what is on in each campaign today. Defaults are only where it started, and anyone with access can flip the other toggles later.
A spreadsheet with five columns does the job: campaign name, migration date, then one column for each setting. Add notes as you go. When results shift in November and someone asks why, you will have an answer. It also fixes the old agency problem where three people make changes and nobody remembers which one mattered.
Step two. Read the search terms, sorted by spend
Most of the money you can win or lose from this migration sits in one report.
Open the search terms report for each migrated campaign. Filter the match type column to "AI Max" and add the Source column, so you are looking only at the queries the new matching brought in. Sort by cost and read from the top.
Each term goes into one of three piles.
- Gold. Relevant queries you never thought to target. Add the best ones as keywords so you can see and manage them directly.
- Harmless noise. Low spend and loosely related. Leave them alone and look again next week.
- Waste. Job seekers, people after free advice, DIY searches, suburbs you do not service, competitor support lines. These become negatives today.
Then check whether your own business name is turning up inside a campaign that was meant to find new customers. If it is, that campaign is going to look brilliant for the wrong reason.
AI Max has no idea which searches you already owned. It only knows which ones converted. Left alone, it will happily take credit for customers who were coming anyway.
Two habits make this faster. Start with the terms that spent money and did not convert, because every dollar there is leakage. Then look for repeat words instead of single queries. If "free", "course" or "salary" shows up more than once, add the word itself as a negative, and put it in a shared negative keyword list so the same junk does not have to be caught in five campaigns.
Do not overcorrect. A query that looks odd but turned into a paying customer belongs in the gold pile. The test is whether it brought you business. Whether you would have thought of it yourself is irrelevant.
Step three. Set brand exclusions and inclusions on purpose
Hardly anyone touches these two settings, and they do more for honest reporting than anything else in AI Max.
Brand exclusions keep a campaign from serving on the branded queries you list. Your own name can go on that list. Use it on prospecting campaigns so demand for your name lives in a separate campaign and gets judged there.
Brand inclusions do the opposite. They limit a campaign or an ad group to searches related to the brands you choose. That suits a tightly controlled branded campaign, or a reseller who only wants searches naming the labels they stock.
Resellers need to think harder. If you stock Dyson or Makita, searches for those names might be your best traffic. You might also be paying to send people into a price comparison they will finish on someone else's site. Look at which of those searches turned into sales before you decide.
The split matters because people who type your name already know you, and they convert at rates cold traffic never will. Mix the two in a single campaign and the average looks fantastic. You scale it with confidence, and the extra budget flows into the weaker non branded searches hiding underneath.
Step four. Check where the clicks are landing
Final URL expansion lets Google send a query to whichever page on your site it judges most relevant, instead of the one you set.
The September migration leaves it off. Check anyway. Somebody may have switched it on since, and turning it on requires text customisation, so the two tend to arrive together. If you still run Dynamic Search Ads, Google says those campaigns get all three features when they are upgraded from February 2027.
When it is on, sometimes the page it picks beats yours. Other times it picks your blog, your careers page, or an offer that ended in June.
Open the landing pages report and look at every URL receiving paid clicks. The "Selected by" column shows which ones the system chose. For each, ask one plain question: would I pay to send a buyer here?
Anything that fails goes on the campaign's URL exclusion list. Careers and blog pages are the usual offenders, along with login screens and expired offers. Where an entire section of the site should never get paid traffic, exclude it with a rule now instead of one page at a time as you stumble across them.
If expansion keeps choosing a page you would never have picked and that page converts well, pay attention. It is telling you something about the landing page you did pick.
This step doubles as a website audit. Sometimes the fix is an exclusion and sometimes it is a better page. For the second case, the anatomy of a landing page that prints money is a good checklist.
Step five. Read what it is saying for you
Text customisation writes headlines and descriptions from your existing ads, your landing page copy and your assets.
Open the asset report and find the rows marked "Google AI" in the "Added by" column. Read them like a compliance officer would. You are looking for claims you cannot back up, prices that no longer apply and services you have stopped providing. Remove anything that fails by clicking its status icon.
Most of it will be fine. The small share that is wrong still matters, because an ad making a promise you never made is still your ad.
When generated copy drifts, the fix usually starts on your website. The system reads your pages, so a page that still advertises last year's price will produce an ad with last year's price.
The stakes are highest if you work in health, finance, law or a licensed trade. A generated headline promising a guaranteed result can end with a letter from a regulator. Read the generated text every week and keep your site copy tight.
Step six. Judge on outcomes, not the dashboard
Pick a comparison window from before the migration that matches for length and season. Then compare the things that pay you.
- Qualified leads. Form fills do not count until someone confirms they were real. Ask whoever answers the phone whether enquiries changed.
- Revenue or booked jobs from each campaign.
- Branded and non branded conversions, reported separately.
- Share of spend going to AI Max matched terms versus your own keywords.
If quality held and volume grew, you have a better campaign. If volume grew and quality fell, the machine is chasing the wrong signal. The fix for that is in your conversion setup, and no AI Max toggle will solve it.
AI Max optimises toward whatever you count as a conversion. Count a page view, a tap on your phone number or a half finished form, and the system will go and find more of those while the dashboard cheers. Count the things that make you money instead. Importing offline conversions from your CRM is the best way to do it, because then Google can see which leads became customers.
A worked example
This one is hypothetical.
Say you run a Melbourne commercial cleaning company spending $6,000 a month on Google Ads. One of your Search campaigns had Automatically Created Assets on, so it was upgraded in early September with search term matching and text customisation. In week two a colleague also switched on final URL expansion to see what it would do. Three weeks later, cost per conversion is down and conversions are up. Tempting to call it a win.
You open the search terms report. Near the top by spend: "cleaning jobs Melbourne", "how to clean office carpet", and your own business name. You add the jobs and how to terms as negatives and set a brand exclusion so your name is handled by its own branded campaign.
The landing pages report shows paid clicks going to your careers page and an old end of financial year offer. Both go on the URL exclusion list.
Generated headlines include "Same Day Service", which you stopped offering in winter. You remove the asset and update the page it came from.
Then you ring whoever handles enquiries. A chunk of the extra "conversions" turn out to be job seekers and people who tapped the phone number by mistake. Once those are stripped out, the result is roughly flat. That is a very different decision from the one the dashboard was pushing you toward.
The weekly rhythm from here
One pass does not finish the job. AI Max keeps learning, which means it keeps finding new queries and new phrasings.
Put a recurring 30 minute slot in the diary and work through the same order each time. A dull half hour every week beats a heroic audit once a quarter.
- Search terms. Sort by cost, add negatives, promote the gold to keywords.
- Landing pages. Look for any new URL receiving clicks, then exclude it or improve it.
- Generated text. Skim new "Google AI" assets for claims you would not approve.
- Outcomes. Compare qualified leads and revenue with last week and with your pre migration baseline.
- Log it. One line per change in your audit spreadsheet.
This fits the same thinking as the audit that finds your wasted ad spend. Waste rarely arrives in one dramatic moment. It leaks in weekly, one query at a time.
Open your campaign settings today and find out which campaigns moved. Then read the top of the search terms report before you look at anything else.
If you would rather have someone else sit in that weekly slot, our advertising team at LIQID NOISE runs exactly this audit and rhythm on Google accounts. The aim is to let the machine find the new customers it is good at finding, and stop it spending your money on the rest.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if Google moved my campaign to AI Max?
Open the Settings for each Search campaign in Google Ads and look at the AI Max section. If AI Max is on and nobody on your team enabled it, Google upgraded the campaign. The automatic upgrade began on 1 September 2026 and covers Search campaigns that used the campaign level broad match setting or Automatically Created Assets, so check those first and note which AI Max features are switched on.
How do I stop AI Max showing ads for my own brand name?
Use brand exclusions on your prospecting campaigns and put your own brand on the list. That keeps searches for your name out of campaigns meant to find new customers, so a separate branded campaign can handle them. It also stops branded conversions making a prospecting campaign look far better than it is.
Can AI Max send clicks to the wrong page on my website?
Yes, if final URL expansion is switched on. It lets Google choose the page it thinks is most relevant, which can include blog posts or old offers. The September 2026 upgrade does not enable it by default, so first check whether it is on. If it is, review the landing pages report and add any URL you would not pay for to the URL exclusion list.
Is lower cost per conversion after the AI Max switch a good sign?
Not by itself. Lower cost per conversion can come from branded traffic, or from weak conversion actions like phone number clicks. Compare qualified leads and revenue against a similar period before the migration. If quality held while volume grew, the improvement is real.