Google spent September quietly flipping eligible Search campaigns to AI Max, and the window closes on the 30th. That leaves roughly ten days for small-business owners running Campaign-level Broad Match or standalone Automatically Created Assets to decide whether to accept the upgrade, temporarily disable it, or restructure before the migration lands on their account.

The rollout has been notably silent. Coverage of the change describes advertisers noticing only after ad copy shifted or spend patterns turned strange, with PPC consultant David Melamed among the first to flag the forced-upgrade behavior and JXT Group founder Menachem Ani surfacing the notification emails on X. Since August 3, new Campaign-level Broad Match configurations and legacy ACA campaigns can no longer be created in the Google Ads UI, Ads Editor, or API. The old shape of a Search campaign is being deprecated in place.

AI Max isn’t a new campaign type. Google frames it as a setting on the existing campaign, so IDs, names, and structure carry through. What changes is behavior: keyword matching expands beyond the advertiser’s list into AI_MAX_BROAD_MATCH and AI_MAX_KEYWORDLESS traffic, text assets can be auto-generated (marked “Google AI” in the asset report), and landing pages can be swapped via expanded_final_url. Existing brand inclusions and exclusions do carry over automatically.

Google’s own numbers are modest. Brandon Ervin, Director of Product Management for Google Ads, cites “hundreds of thousands of global advertisers already scaling their Search campaigns” on AI Max and claims an average 7% lift in conversions or conversion value at similar CPA/ROAS when the full feature suite is used. For a five-to-thirty-person team on a hand-tuned budget, a 7% average lift isn’t the same as a 7% guarantee, and drift into irrelevant queries can eat the delta fast.

The measurement gotchas deserve a bookmark. Google’s documentation warns the AI Max search-term view and the classic search terms report overlap: “never sum metrics from these two views.” Filtering by match type “AI Max” excludes “Other search terms” and can understate volume. And the campaign toggle “must be turned on at the campaign level in order to be used at the ad group level.”

Practically, owners have three moves before September 30: audit which campaigns are eligible, decide whether to accept, disable, or restructure, and set reporting expectations for October. Re-enabling later restores prior feature-level settings, so a temporary opt-out isn’t destructive. Dynamic Search Ads, extended in June, now migrate in February 2027, buying that cohort time this one didn’t get.

For context on how AI-driven visibility is reshaping the rest of Google’s stack, see the AI search visibility report and the merchant-side AI Shopping dashboard.

Sources