No, the AI Max Migration Wasn't Postponed. Only Part of It Was.

If you read in June that Google had postponed the AI Max migration and made a note to deal with it next year, this post is for you. The postponement was real. It covered one of the three affected features. The other two upgrade on 1 September, which is roughly two weeks away.

What actually happened, in order

15 April 2026. Google announced AI Max for Search was leaving beta and that three things would be automatically upgraded into it in September: Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, and the campaign-level broad match setting. It was announced as a bundle, which is where the confusion starts.

11 June 2026. Google postponed the automatic migration by five months, to February 2027. The stated reason was advertiser feedback about campaign changes landing in the fourth quarter. This was widely reported, and reported accurately — but the postponement applied only to Dynamic Search Ads. The other two features kept their September date.

5 August 2026. Google confirmed to affected advertisers, by email, that Search campaigns using automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match will be upgraded to AI Max starting 1 September. There was no blog post. If the email went to an address nobody monitors, the first sign will be the upgrade itself.

That is the whole story. One feature moved, two did not, and the announcement that they hadn’t moved arrived through the quietest channel Google has.

Who this affects on 1 September

Two settings, and they are both easy to have on without remembering you turned them on.

Automatically created assets. Google generates headlines and descriptions from your landing pages and mixes them into your responsive search ads. It has been on by default for new campaigns for long enough that plenty of accounts have it running in campaigns nobody has audited since launch.

Campaign-level broad match. Not broad match keywords — the campaign-level setting that applies broad matching across the campaign regardless of individual keyword match types. Also easy to inherit from a template or a recommendation you accepted at some point.

If neither is on anywhere in your account, 1 September is not your problem. Dynamic Search Ads still upgrade in February 2027, so it becomes your problem then.

What changes when a campaign is upgraded

AI Max moves query matching and ad creation further into Google’s systems. In practice, three things expand:

Search term matching widens beyond your keyword list, using the landing page and existing assets to find queries you did not specify.

Text customization generates headlines dynamically per query rather than serving only what you wrote.

Final URL expansion sends traffic to whichever page on your site Google judges most relevant, not necessarily the one the ad group points at.

Google’s own figure is that campaigns using the full feature suite see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS, compared with using search term matching alone. That is a real number from a large sample, and it is also an average — which means it is not a forecast for your account.

The controls you keep

This is the part worth knowing before the upgrade rather than after, because it is where most of the risk sits and most of the mitigation lives.

Brand exclusions stop AI Max serving against your own brand terms — or a competitor’s. If you run separate brand campaigns with different bids and different landing pages, this is the setting that stops the expanded matching from cannibalising them.

URL inclusion and exclusion constrain final URL expansion to pages you actually want traffic hitting. Left open, it will find your blog, your careers page, and anything else that reads as relevant.

Search term analysis shows what the expanded matching is actually matching to. This is the report to check weekly for the first month, not monthly.

Asset removal lets you delete generated text you do not want serving.

None of these are on by default in a way that reflects your business. They reflect Google’s defaults.

What to do in the next two weeks

Find out whether you are affected. In Google Ads, check every Search campaign for automatically created assets and for the campaign-level broad match setting. The email went to affected accounts, but if your account is managed by an agency, the email went to them.

Export your baseline. Whatever your Search campaigns did in the four weeks before 1 September, you want it saved outside the platform: impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, conversion value, CPA, and search terms. After the upgrade, the account’s own reporting will show a changed campaign type and the before-and-after comparison gets harder to reconstruct. Take the snapshot now.

Set brand exclusions before, not after. If the expanded matching starts serving against your brand terms on 1 September and you notice in week three, you have paid for three weeks of traffic you were already getting for less.

Constrain final URL expansion. Decide which pages are valid destinations and exclude everything else.

Check your conversion tracking actually works. This matters more after the upgrade than before. When matching expands beyond a keyword list you wrote, the quality of the signal you send back is what keeps the system pointed at the right traffic. An account with broken or partial conversion tracking was already guessing; after 1 September it will guess across a wider surface.

Decide about landing pages. Final URL expansion assumes the pages it can reach are ones you would be happy to send paid traffic to. For most accounts, some of them are not.

If you would rather not be upgraded

There is no opt-out button. The only way to avoid the 1 September upgrade is to turn off the features that trigger it — remove automatically created assets, or switch off the campaign-level broad match setting — before it happens.

That is a legitimate choice for some accounts, and a bad one for others. If you have a tightly controlled account with a mature keyword list, strong negative lists, and landing pages mapped to specific ad groups, staying out is defensible for now. If your account is broad, under-managed, or relies on automatically created assets to fill out RSAs you never finished writing, the upgrade will probably help you.

What is not defensible is being upgraded without knowing it happened.

The February 2027 question

Dynamic Search Ads got a five-month reprieve, not a pardon. New DSA creation is being frozen in the interface, Editor and the API, and the automatic migration begins in February 2027.

If you run DSA, the useful thing to do between now and then is understand what it is actually doing for you. In most accounts DSA operates as a long-tail catch-all — it picks up queries the keyword list misses, and nobody has looked closely at which ones in years. Pull the search terms report, work out what share of DSA-driven conversions came from queries you could have targeted deliberately, and you will know whether the February migration is a risk or a formality.

What we would tell a client

Two weeks is enough time to do this properly and not enough time to do it twice.

Audit the account this week. Export the baseline. Set brand exclusions and URL constraints before 1 September rather than reacting to what happens after. Then watch the search terms report weekly through September — not because AI Max is dangerous, but because expanded matching on an account with defaults set by Google is a different account from the one you were running in August.

And if the answer to “who monitors the Google Ads notification email” is nobody, that is worth fixing regardless. This is the second time in six months that a material change arrived that way.