Google is moving your Search campaigns to AI Max this month

A change on a day you do not choose

If your Search campaigns use the campaign-level broad match setting, or automatically created assets on their own, Google is upgrading them to AI Max during September. Not offering to. Doing it:

On September 1, 2026, Google Ads will begin automatically upgrading Search campaigns using Campaign-level Broad Match (CB) or standalone Automatically Created Assets (ACA) to AI Max. The migration job will roll out progressively throughout the month.

• Migrate Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets to AI Max, Google Ads Developer Blog, 12 August 2026

"Progressively throughout the month" is the part that makes this hard to manage. There is no published schedule per account, so the answer to "has it happened to us yet" cannot be looked up. It has to be checked.

The advertiser-facing help page carries the same date, so this is not developer trivia:

To help more advertisers access the benefits of AI Max, starting in September 2026, campaigns using campaign-level broad match setting will automatically be upgraded to AI Max.

• About the broad match keywords campaign setting, Google Ads Help

Dynamic Search Ads are a separate matter and were pushed back: Google's blog says that transition begins in February 2027. If somebody told you DSA was moving this month, they read the top half of a post that Google later updated.

What changes on the day

The migration is in place, which Google frames as continuity, and the settings your campaign lands on are published. The defaults differ depending on which legacy setting you were using:

Source for every cell except the ACA brand-list row, which Google's configuration list does not mention: the Developer Blog post, Google Ads Developer Blog, 12 August 2026.

Search term matching is the row that moves money. Google describes what it does plainly enough:

With search term matching, you can expand upon your existing keywords using broad match and keywordless technology to find more relevant and high-performing search queries. AI for Google Ads will learn from your current keywords, creatives and URLs to optimize which relevant searches your ads appear on, capturing queries and conversions you might otherwise miss.

• How AI Max for Search campaigns works, Google Ads Help

"Keywordless technology" means your ads can serve on searches that no keyword of yours matched, chosen from your landing pages and assets. Whether that is good or expensive is an empirical question about your account, and the reporting section below is where you answer it.

How do you check whether it has already happened?

Google stamps the date on the campaign itself, in two fields that you cannot write to. From the API reference:

Output only. The timestamp when the ACA campaign was migrated to AI Max. The timestamp is in the customer's timezone and in "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" format.

• campaign.aca_migration_date_time, Google Ads API field reference, v25

There is a matching campaign.broad_match_migration_date_time with the same description, reading "the Broad Match campaign" in place of "the ACA campaign". Output only means this is Google's own record of what it did and when, in your account's timezone, and neither you nor an agency can clear it.

Google publishes a query for reading them, and this is it, verbatim apart from indentation:

SELECT
  campaign.id,
  campaign.name,
  campaign.aca_migration_date_time,
  campaign.broad_match_migration_date_time
FROM campaign
WHERE campaign.aca_migration_date_time > '1970-01-01 00:00:00'
  AND campaign.broad_match_migration_date_time > '1970-01-01 00:00:00'

Run that and read the result carefully, because the two conditions are joined with AND. Read the field descriptions and the split is plain: a campaign migrated from campaign-level broad match gets the broad match stamp, a campaign migrated from standalone ACA gets the ACA one. Google does not spell out a case where one campaign carries both, and only a campaign carrying both satisfies that WHERE clause, so the query can return nothing at all while your campaigns have been migrated.

Swapping AND for OR returns every campaign carrying either stamp, which is what the question usually is. That change is ours, not Google's, so treat it as a reading of the field descriptions rather than as vendor guidance.

One prerequisite: those two fields shipped in version 25.1 of the API on 19 August 2026, thirteen days before the migration began. A reporting script pinned to an older version cannot select them.

And if you do not touch the API?

Then the honest answer is that there is no confirmed place in the interface where this is written down. Change history is the natural place to look, and Google describes how automated changes appear there:

Changes made by automated systems or Google's internal systems may appear under users like "ads-dartsearch-budget" or "Google Ads system". [...] Sometimes, not all account-level settings changes or changes made by Google representatives during consultations are listed.

• About change history, Google Ads Help

Worth checking, under Change history in the Campaigns menu. But no Google page states that this migration is recorded there, and the same page warns that not everything is. The campaign settings screen is the other check: open the campaign, select AI Max in the section menu, and read whether the toggle is on. The menu entry is there on every Search campaign, because it is where AI Max gets switched on, so the toggle answers the question and the menu does not.

Google does promise some notice, and the wording is specific about where:

You'll receive notifications in your account before the transition begins.

• We're upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max, Google, updated 11 June 2026

In your account. Not an email to whoever actually watches the spend.

Where the money goes now, and how to see it

The reporting that answers "what am I paying for" is in the search terms report, and two aggregate rows in the keywords report separate the new traffic from the old:

Total: AI Max expanded matches: Total traffic from broad match keywords created by AI Max for Search campaigns, based on the keywords you added

Total: AI Max landing page matches: Total traffic from search queries that matched because of your landing pages or assets, outside of your keywords

• About reporting in AI Max for Search campaigns, Google Ads Help

The second row is the one to look at first. That is traffic from searches where no keyword of yours was involved, and you paid for all of it. There is also a fuller view:

On top of the search terms report table, select the Search terms dropdown and choose "Search terms and landing pages from AI Max". This view lists the search terms that triggered your ads and shows the headlines, landing pages, campaigns, and ad groups that made up the full customer ad journey.

• same page, Google Ads Help

When something in there is wrong for your business, the controls are the familiar ones, with one piece of timing advice from Google attached:

If any landing pages or search terms are under-performing and you'd like to stop serving ads for them, you can add an exclusion.

• same page, Google Ads Help

The same page asks for patience first:

To get the most out of your reporting metrics, you should wait at least 2 weeks after enabling AI Max for a new or existing Search campaign before making changes, like adding negative keywords.

• same page, Google Ads Help

The change to keyword behaviour that is easy to miss

If you used the broad match campaign setting deliberately, one of its side effects does not survive the move:

When disabling the broad match campaign setting or moving to AI Max, broad keywords are not treated as exact match keywords in prioritization. To maintain this keyword prioritization without the broad match campaign setting enabled, add copies of exact match keywords in your new AI Max campaign (broad can be converted to exact, but that will remove historical keyword stats).

• About the broad match keywords campaign setting, Google Ads Help

Read the parenthesis before acting on the sentence. The documented remedy costs you historical keyword statistics if you convert rather than add, which is a real loss for anyone whose bidding decisions lean on that history.

Can you turn it off?

Partly, and the granularity is the useful detail. Search term matching is switched off per ad group, not per campaign:

Turning on AI Max will turn on search term matching for your campaign to enhance reach and optimization. You can toggle it off in the ad group settings.

• How AI Max for Search campaigns works, Google Ads Help

The API confirms the same shape from the other side: the campaign field enable_ai_max is the master switch, and its own description says search term matching "is enabled by default when AI Max is enabled, and can be disabled at the ad group level", where the field is called disable_search_term_matching.

Turning AI Max off entirely is a campaign-level toggle, and Google says it takes other things with it:

AI Max contains a suite of features within a campaign. When turned off, all of the AI Max features will be disabled and campaign performance may be impacted. For example, if your campaign is running brand exclusions and AI Max is turned off, brand exclusions will be disabled.

Turning AI Max back on will re-enable those settings just as they originally were set.

• AI Max for Search campaigns FAQ, Google Ads Help

Two things that page does not say, and neither does any other Google page found for this article. It does not offer a way to opt out of the September migration itself. What Google does offer beforehand is an early upgrade rather than an exemption: its product blog tells ACA and campaign-level broad match users to "look for a pop-up banner in your Google Ads UI to upgrade to AI Max", and going first is not opting out, it only lets you choose the day. And it does not say that switching AI Max off restores your old campaign-level broad match or ACA setup. The Developer Blog says those legacy entities are being removed from new API versions, so plan on the new structure being where you live from now on.

Read the performance claim with its clause attached

Google's number for AI Max is quoted a lot, usually without the comparison it rests on:

AI Max for Search campaigns see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS when using the full feature suite - search term matching, text customization and final URL expansion - compared to using search term matching alone.

• We're upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max, Google, updated 11 June 2026

The baseline is search term matching alone, not your account before September, and the footnote on that page reads "Google internal data, 2026; for non-Retail advertisers". It is a claim about turning more AI Max features on once you are already on AI Max. Whether the migration itself helped your account is a question your own data answers, after a couple of weeks of it.

Even Google's pages are behind on this

Worth knowing before you trust a help page you find by search. In the first week of September the AI Max FAQ still said:

Activating or deactivating AI Max may cause errors for API requests managing text customization and brand settings in your campaign, as AI Max is not yet available in the API and Editor. [...] Support for Editor and API is expected later in 2025.

• AI Max for Search campaigns FAQ, Google Ads Help

The API fields quoted earlier in this article are in version 25, so that paragraph was roughly a year stale when it was read. Same pattern on the announcement post, whose body listed Dynamic Search Ads among the September upgrades while the update note at the top moved them to 2027. Both may be corrected by the time you read this, which is itself the point about relying on a help page. When two vendor pages disagree, the dated developer post and the API reference are the ones with a version number attached.

What to do this week

1. Find out whether it has happened. Run Google's query, with OR in place of AND if you want campaigns migrated by either path, on API version 25.1 or later. If you do not use the API, open a Search campaign, select AI Max in the section menu and check whether the toggle is on.
2. Write down the migration timestamp for each campaign. It is the boundary for every before-and-after comparison you are about to make, and it is in your account's timezone.
3. Pull the search terms report for the days since, and specifically the AI Max landing page matches row. That is traffic from queries no keyword of yours matched, and it is on your bill.
4. Give it two weeks before pruning, as Google asks, then add negatives and URL exclusions for what is clearly wrong.
5. Decide about search term matching per ad group, not per campaign. That is the granularity the setting actually has, and it lets you keep it where it earns its place.
6. Check whether anything you own reads the legacy fields. Reporting scripts, agency dashboards and any automation that touched campaign-level broad match settings are on a clock: new API versions after 1 September remove those entities, and older versions sunset around September 2027.
7. Compare like with like. Conversions in the fortnight after migration against the fortnight before, on the same campaigns, with the timestamp as the dividing line.

When this is a job to hand over

Reading a report and adding a few negatives is ordinary account work. Do it yourself.

It becomes a job when the reporting script that feeds your dashboard breaks on removed fields, when nobody can say which campaigns changed on which day because nothing recorded it, or when spend moved and the question is where it went. Work like that has a size and a price agreed up front, which is what Fix S and Fix M are.

The wider pattern is the one worth internalising: a vendor changing something under a working setup is normal. What varies is who gets told, and here it was a developer blog and a banner, while the bill arrives somewhere else. Google Ads had a different September surprise for the same people, and that one also arrived without an email.

Sources

• Migrate Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets to AI Max - Google Ads Developer Blog, 12 August 2026, read 6 September 2026. The 1 to 30 September window, the in-place upgrade, the default settings for both migration paths, the GAQL query, and the removal of legacy entities from new API versions.
• About the broad match keywords campaign setting - Google Ads Help, read 6 September 2026. The September banner on an advertiser-facing page, and the loss of exact-match prioritisation for broad keywords after the move.
• How AI Max for Search campaigns works - Google Ads Help, read 6 September 2026. What search term matching does, that it is on when AI Max is on, and that it toggles off in ad group settings.
• Set up AI Max for Search campaigns - Google Ads Help, read 6 September 2026. Where the settings live in the interface, at campaign and ad group level.
• AI Max for Search campaigns FAQ - Google Ads Help, read 6 September 2026. What turning AI Max off disables, that re-enabling restores those settings, and the stale paragraph saying AI Max is not yet in the API.
• About reporting in AI Max for Search campaigns - Google Ads Help, read 6 September 2026. The AI Max expanded matches and landing page matches rows, the search terms and landing pages view, exclusions, and the two-week wait before pruning.
• About change history - Google Ads Help, read 6 September 2026. How automated changes appear, and the warning that not all changes are listed.
• Google Ads API field reference, v25 - Google Ads API documentation, read 6 September 2026. The two output-only migration timestamp fields, and the enable_ai_max description confirming search term matching on by default with an ad group level off switch.
• Google Ads API release notes - Google Ads API documentation, read 6 September 2026. Version 25.1, released 19 August 2026, adding the two migration timestamp fields.
• We're upgrading Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max - Google, published 15 April 2026 and updated 11 June 2026, read 6 September 2026. Dynamic Search Ads moving to February 2027 while ACA and broad match upgrade from September, the in-account notification promise, and the 7% figure with its comparison and footnote.