On September 1, Google Ads begins auto-upgrading qualifying Search campaigns to AI Max, and the small-business owners who haven’t touched their accounts since summer are about to find out what Google’s defaults look like when they’re the ones running the ads. The August 5 confirmation email named the two triggers plainly: any campaign using Automatically Created Assets or the campaign-level broad match setting is in scope. TechWyse notes there’s no opt-out other than disabling those features before Tuesday. As of August 3, the Ads UI, Ads Editor, and API stopped letting anyone create new legacy configurations of either.

The defaults matter because they aren’t identical. Campaigns with ACA come out the other side with search term matching AND text customization switched on. Broad-match campaigns get search term matching only. Search term matching, Google clarified back in December 2025, doesn’t match on literal query text; it matches on inferred intent, which is a very different thing to hand a stranger’s credit card.

Google’s April 15 general-availability post from Brandon Ervin, Director of Product Management at Google Ads, claims an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA/ROAS when the full feature suite is used. That number was 14% at the May 2025 beta launch. Retail advertisers were excluded from the underlying dataset. Google also warns AI Max won’t be effective if a campaign is budget-constrained, which describes most of the small-team accounts about to be upgraded.

The independent numbers point the other way. Ezra Sackett, Director of Paid Search at Monks, reported in August 2025 that 99% of AI Max impressions produced zero conversions across roughly 30,000 search terms in client accounts. Intelligency Group found Search Partner Network placements running 37% below Google Search proper on ROAS. A November 2025 analysis of more than 250 retail campaigns pegged AI Max at roughly 35% lower ROAS than traditional match types.

Dynamic Search Ads got a five-month reprieve on June 11, pushing DSA migration to February 2027. Everyone else has a week. Existing brand inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically, per the Google Ads Developer Blog on August 12, but negative keywords and text guidelines still need to be set by a human before Tuesday, and tracking templates built around fixed destinations can break under final URL expansion. For the mechanics of what changes at the campaign level, see our earlier rundown of the migration mechanics.

Eleven months of open beta produced a headline number that shrank by half between launch and GA. That’s the disclosure. The migration proceeds anyway.

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