Google Ads Updates: A Complete Guide

Quick Answer

As of September 2026, the Google Ads updates that matter most are AI Max for Search and the auto-upgrades pulling older campaigns into it. Next come the new Performance Max controls and two hard deadlines for call ads and Dynamic Search Ads in February 2027. Start by checking which settings Google has switched on by default, because most other news can wait.

Google changes Google Ads constantly, and most changes arrive switched on, which is how they end up costing business owners money. In my experience, the most common mistake is not adapting when Google migrates or retires a feature, because Google defaults to whatever it is pushing at the time. If you do nothing, you get Google’s preferred setup, whether or not it suits your account.

I have sorted the last 18 months of changes by what they do to your budget and leads, and for each one I list the settings I change in the accounts I manage at 94n.

How to read this guide: act now, monitor, or ignore

Every update below gets one of three verdicts, so you can spend your attention where your money is exposed.

• Act now: the change is live or has a deadline, and doing nothing lets Google choose for you.
• Monitor: still rolling out or in testing, so watch your reports and revisit it in a quarter.
• Ignore for now: unlikely to change results for a typical small or mid-sized account.

AI Max for Search: what changed, and why I switch most of it off

AI Max for Search is a set of AI features you switch on inside a normal Search campaign. Google announced AI Max on May 6, 2025, and made it available to all advertisers on September 10, 2025. Google calls it its fastest-growing AI-powered Search ads product, and it matters because it lets Google show your ads on searches you never chose as keywords.

What AI Max does

According to Google’s AI Max documentation, the feature has three main parts plus brand controls:

• Search term matching uses broad match and “keywordless” technology to find searches beyond your keyword list.
• Text customization writes new headlines and descriptions from your landing pages, ads and keywords.
• Final URL expansion sends people to whichever page on your site Google thinks fits best.
• Brand controls let you include or exclude specific brands. Inclusions work at campaign and ad group level, and exclusions work at campaign level.

Google says advertisers who turn on AI Max “will typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS,” citing its own internal data from 2025 for non-retail advertisers.

What I see in real accounts

In the accounts I manage, a properly set-up AI Max shows no real impact on performance. When it is set up poorly, the pattern I see is predictable:

• impressions go up
• click-through rate drops sharply
• cost per acquisition (CPA) rises
• some of your budget goes to waste

Open the search terms report and you start to see strange matches, such as random single words and emojis, or searches with nothing to do with your business. Then open asset reporting and read the ad copy AI Max wrote for you. Most owners are unpleasantly surprised by how weak Google’s AI is at writing ad copy, and so far I have not seen a case where AI Max led to better performance.

The settings I change

The only reason I have found to use AI Max in my own campaigns is the brand inclusion and brand exclusion controls, and if you want those, this is how I set it up:

1. Turn AI Max on at campaign level to get access to the brand controls.
2. Go into each ad group’s settings and turn search term matching off.
3. Check again every time you add a new ad group. Google’s help page confirms search term matching is “on by default when AI Max is turned on” for the campaign, so each new ad group starts with it switched on.

If you add one ad group three months after a cleanup and forget that last step, the junk search terms come straight back in, often without anyone noticing.

Dynamic Search Ads are moving into AI Max

If you run Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), which build ads from your website’s content, you have a deadline. Google opened voluntary upgrades to AI Max the week of April 15, 2026. After an update on June 11, 2026, the DSA sunset and automatic upgrade now begin in February 2027.

Starting September 2026, Google is already auto-upgrading other Search campaigns to AI Max if they use automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting. According to Google’s announcement, upgraded broad match campaigns get search term matching on by default. Campaigns using automatically created assets get search term matching and text customization on.

My advice is to upgrade on your own schedule and apply the ad group settings above, because if you wait, Google’s defaults decide which features are on.

Performance Max has new controls: the six things I change on day one

Performance Max (PMax) is Google’s all-in-one campaign type, which reaches all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps. For years its biggest problem was that you could not see where the money went, and that changed in 2025.

By August 2025, Google had rolled out search terms reporting for all PMax campaigns along with negative keyword lists. It had also introduced a channel performance report, and you can now add up to 10,000 negative keywords to a single Performance Max campaign. These controls only help if you use them, and when I take over a PMax campaign, these are the six things I change first.

1. Turn off every asset enhancement

PMax comes with automation settings that change your ads for you, such as text customization, final URL expansion, and image and video enhancements. Google’s asset automation documentation shows most of these are on by default. I turn every one of those boxes off, because I want to control what the ad says and where it sends people.

2. Use brand exclusions and a brand negative keyword list

Google says PMax’s campaign-level brand exclusion blocks your ads on searches for your brand name and “common misspellings.” Once Google released search terms reports for PMax, I could see that plenty of misspellings still came through with the brand excluded. That inflates your PMax results with people who were already looking for you.

The fix is to also add a negative keyword list with your brand terms, so you get a clean split between brand and non-brand. Then check the search terms report regularly and add any branded terms or misspellings you find.

3. Lock down content suitability at account level

Content suitability is the setting I find missing most often, and without it PMax can run wild on low-quality app inventory and strange placements. Google’s brand suitability controls for PMax sit at account level, and I set them like this:

• Inventory type set to Limited, the most restrictive option.
• Every app category excluded.
• Content negative keywords added for sensitive topics.
• Almost all of the sensitive content boxes ticked.

I am not worried about limiting inventory, because Google will not exclude as much as it should on its own. PMax does not give you many levers to pull, so use the ones you have.

4. Keep brand out of PMax completely

Every audience you add to PMax is treated as a signal, which is a hint Google is free to ignore when it decides who sees your ads. I often see people try to build a “branded PMax” campaign. It does not work, and it tells me straight away that whoever set it up does not know the campaign type.

If you want to cover brand searches, run a branded Search campaign and a branded Standard Shopping campaign. PMax should always be non-brand, and excluding your brand should be one of your top priorities when you set it up.

5. Treat PMax as a supporting campaign

PMax is good at picking up last-click conversions from people who have already engaged with you enough to be easy wins. Because it serves on almost any inventory it can, I treat it as a supporting campaign rather than the main one. I set its target return on ad spend (ROAS) higher than any other non-brand campaign in the account, which keeps it focused on bottom-of-funnel conversions.

In lead generation accounts I often take PMax out altogether and replace it with Search. When I have taken over a lead gen account where the client ran PMax and complained about lead quality, that swap improved lead quality about 9 times out of 10. I have not run a controlled study on this, but it is what I keep seeing.

I have yet to see a case where PMax beats Search plus Demand Gen. In my experience, Google reps often pitch PMax as a one-size-fits-all campaign, but for lead gen it works best filling the gaps between your other campaigns.

6. Check channel reporting regularly

The channel performance report shows where PMax spends your money, and the split changes often. More than once I have seen a campaign do well while serving mostly on Shopping and then switch to Gmail overnight, with results that changed along with it.

If the report shows Gmail producing good conversions inside PMax, that makes a case for a separate Demand Gen campaign to scale it. Demand Gen has channel controls that let you choose Gmail on its own, so you can isolate that placement and start with retargeting, since that is probably what is converting.

Ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode: monitor, don’t chase

AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries at the top of some Google results, and AI Mode is Google’s chat-style search. In May 2025 Google said it was expanding ads in AI Overviews and testing ads in AI Mode in the US. In May 2026 it announced new AI Mode formats, most of them tests or due in the coming months.

There is no separate switch for these placements, because your ads become eligible through broad match, AI Max and Performance Max. The controls above decide how exposed you are, so judge this traffic on lead quality and CPA like any other source.

Bidding changes: Enhanced CPC is gone and exploration is new

Enhanced CPC (eCPC) sat halfway between manual bids and full automation. Google removed it for Search and Display the week of March 31, 2025, and campaigns that were never switched now effectively run on Manual CPC.

If an older campaign has felt flat since spring 2025, check its bid strategy. Once your conversion tracking is reliable, moving it to Smart Bidding (Google’s automated bidding, such as Maximize Conversions or Target CPA) is usually the right call.

The newer option is Smart Bidding Exploration, which uses more flexible ROAS targets to find extra conversions. Google reports that campaigns using it see “an 18% increase in unique search query categories with conversions and a 19% increase in conversions” on average. These are Google’s own figures, and I would only test Exploration on campaigns with steady conversion volume.

Deadlines that break campaigns if you miss them

If you do nothing on any of these dates, Google picks the replacement for you. I have never put a dollar figure on what missing one costs, but I regularly see owners miss them.

The call ads dates come from Google’s call ads transition notice. The AI Max and DSA dates come from Google’s DSA upgrade announcement, which Google has already revised once, so check it before you plan around it.

Other updates worth knowing about

For most small and mid-sized accounts, these come second to everything above.

• Demand Gen improvements (monitor). Google says Demand Gen saw “a 26% increase in conversions per dollar” in a year. The channel controls matter more to me, because they make the Gmail retargeting approach above possible.
• AI Max for Shopping and AI Brief (monitor). In April 2026 Google announced AI Max for Shopping and AI Brief, a way to tell Google’s AI what your ads should and shouldn’t say. Given the AI-written ad copy I see in Search, test carefully.
• Data Manager API (ignore unless you upload data). Google made the Data Manager API generally available on December 9, 2025. It lets your developer or agency send first-party data, such as offline conversions from your CRM, once and use it across Google’s ad products.

How I catch Google Ads changes before they cost money

You need a system that tells you when something in your account moves. Scripts are small pieces of JavaScript that run inside your account and can check data or make changes on a schedule. I used to run Google Ads scripts every day in client accounts, and I relied on four of them in particular:

• Budget pacing, so I know early if a campaign is overspending or underspending for the month.
• Main KPI deltas, which flag me whenever a main KPI drops or rises by more than 10%.
• Spend by hour, which flags me if the account had no spend in the last hour. That catches payment problems fast, and payment problems are the main thing to watch for.
• Change detection, which flags any change made by anyone other than me.

The change-detection script matters most, because more than once I have had clients sabotage their own accounts without knowing it. They accepted recommendations in the Google Ads mobile app, or took calls with Google reps and followed their lead.

I have also taken over accounts where the old agency was not clear on when its work should stop. I would be building a new structure while their changes kept landing on the other side. The same script catches automated changes from other scripts or tools, which are usually invisible.

If you do not want to run scripts, the built-in change history shows who changed what over the past two years, including changes made by the Google Ads system. Check it weekly, and review your auto-apply recommendations settings so Google is not accepting changes on your behalf.

For changes to the platform itself, I mostly hear about them through my network of other Google Ads specialists, and we talk regularly about how each change will affect day-to-day work. Without that network, Google’s official new features and announcements page is the one source worth bookmarking.

Frequently asked questions

What are the biggest Google Ads updates in 2026?

As of September 2026, the biggest is the auto-upgrade of some Search campaigns to AI Max, which started in September 2026. Dynamic Search Ads move to AI Max from February 2027, and call-only ads stop serving the same month. Each one changes your settings by default if you do nothing.

Should I turn on AI Max for Search?

Google says AI Max typically brings 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS, based on its own 2025 data for non-retail advertisers. In the accounts I manage, a well-set-up AI Max shows no real impact, and a poorly set-up one raises CPA and wastes spend. I use it only for the brand controls, with search term matching off in every ad group.

What is happening to Dynamic Search Ads?

Google is replacing Dynamic Search Ads with AI Max for Search. Voluntary upgrades opened in April 2026, and after a June 2026 update, the DSA sunset and automatic upgrade begin in February 2027. Upgrading yourself first lets you choose which AI Max features are on.

Can I see search terms in Performance Max now?

Yes, Google had rolled out search terms reporting for all Performance Max campaigns by August 2025, along with campaign-level negative keywords (up to 10,000 per campaign). Google has also introduced a channel performance report that shows where PMax spends your money. Check the search terms report regularly for brand misspellings that slip past brand exclusions.

What to do this week

This week, start with the defaults Google has already switched on in your account:

• Turn off search term matching in every AI Max ad group.
• Turn off PMax asset enhancements and review its search terms and channel reports.
• Put February 2027 in your calendar for call ads and Dynamic Search Ads.
• Set up change alerts, or a weekly check of change history.

If you want a second pair of eyes on how these changes have landed in your account, our Google Ads management team at 94n is happy to take a look and give you a straight answer.