Google Ads Auto-Migrates Campaigns to AI Max in September

This landed on the developer blog, which is where a lot of agencies will miss it. The framing is technical, the sample code is written for people querying the API, and the headline uses two acronyms. Underneath that, it is a product change with a hard date that will alter how live Search campaigns behave, and nobody has to write a line of code for it to happen to them.

Two legacy structures are being retired. Campaign-level broad match, the setting that applied broad matching across an entire campaign rather than keyword by keyword, is going. So are standalone automatically created assets, the feature that let Google generate extra headlines and descriptions from your landing pages alongside a normal responsive search ad. Both are being folded into AI Max, the settings bundle Google now treats as the default shape of a Search campaign.

How the migration works

The change has already started, quietly. Since 3 August 2026 it has been impossible to create a new campaign-level broad match configuration or a new legacy automatically created assets setup anywhere: not in the Google Ads interface, not in Google Ads Editor, and not through any version of the API. That block is the first half of the process. Existing setups were left alone, but no new ones could be built.

The second half begins on 1 September 2026, when Google starts upgrading the campaigns that already carry those settings. The job runs progressively across the month rather than firing once, so migration dates will vary between accounts and, in larger structures, between campaigns in the same account. Planning around a single cutover date is the wrong mental model. Treat the whole of September as the window.

Google describes the campaigns as migrating "in place" to equivalent AI Max settings, with the stated aim of limiting performance volatility. That is broadly true, but the defaults differ depending on which legacy feature the campaign was using, and the difference matters. Campaigns coming from campaign-level broad match arrive with text customisation switched off and final URL expansion switched off. Campaigns coming from automatically created assets arrive with text customisation switched on. Both groups arrive with search term matching switched on. Existing brand inclusion and exclusion lists survive the move intact.

Read that asymmetry carefully, because it is the one genuinely consequential detail in the announcement. If a campaign was running automatically created assets, Google is already generating ad copy for it, so keeping text customisation on preserves the status quo. If a campaign was only using campaign-level broad match, nobody had opted into generated copy, so it stays off. The logic is defensible. The risk is that an account with a mixture of both ends up with two different post-migration configurations, and whoever inherits the account in October has no obvious way of knowing why.

To make the migration auditable, Google has added two timestamp fields to campaign reporting, one recording when automatically created assets were migrated and one recording when broad match was migrated. Anyone with API access or a reporting tool that exposes campaign fields can pull a dated list of what moved and when.

What it looks like in practice

Consider a UK lead generation account with fifteen Search campaigns, four of which were switched to campaign-level broad match eighteen months ago to widen reach on thin keyword sets. Nothing visible happens on 1 September. Some time during the month those four campaigns acquire the AI Max settings panel, search term matching turns on, and the campaigns continue to serve. Reach may widen further, because search term matching is doing work that campaign-level broad match was not. Cost per lead is the metric to watch, not impressions.

Now consider an ecommerce account that turned on automatically created assets across the board in 2024 and never revisited the decision. Those campaigns migrate with text customisation on, meaning Google continues generating headline variants, but now inside the AI Max framework rather than as a bolt-on. For a retailer with tightly controlled product naming or regulated claims, that is worth an explicit review rather than a shrug, particularly if the assets were originally enabled by someone who has since left.

The third case is the one that catches people out: an account where a previous agency enabled campaign-level broad match on a handful of campaigns and never documented it. The current team may not know the setting is there. They will find out in September when the campaigns change shape. Auditing for it in August costs an hour. Discovering it from an unexplained cost per acquisition movement in late September costs considerably more.

Dynamic Search Ads campaigns are the fourth case, and they are on a longer clock. They keep serving normally through September. Google plans in-account banners during the month offering a voluntary one-click upgrade, a reminder in mid-January 2027, then automatic migration across February 2027. At that point new DSA ad groups can no longer be created and any campaign that has not moved becomes a standard Search ad group with AI Max enabled. That timeline is itself a revision. Google originally planned to force the DSA upgrade much earlier, then pushed it back to February 2027 and restored DSA campaign creation in June.

What this means for UK advertisers

The practical instruction for the next two weeks is short: find out which of your campaigns are in scope before Google tells you. Campaign-level broad match and automatically created assets are both settings that get switched on once and then forgotten, which is precisely why the audit is worth doing rather than assuming. For anyone running Google Ads management across multiple client accounts, this is a portfolio-wide check rather than a per-account one, and it is best done in a single pass.

Search term matching being on by default across every migrated campaign deserves particular attention in the UK market. Query expansion behaves differently on British search behaviour than on American, partly because of vocabulary splits (a search for a "letting agent" and a search for a "rental agent" are not the same audience) and partly because UK brand terms collide more often with generic ones. Brand exclusion lists carry over, which helps, but they only help if they were populated in the first place. An empty brand exclusion list survives the migration just as faithfully as a good one.

The reporting consequence is worth flagging to clients in advance rather than after the fact. Campaigns that change matching behaviour mid-month produce September performance data that is not cleanly comparable to August, and any campaign migrated on, say, the 18th contains two different regimes inside one monthly report. If you produce monthly reporting for clients, annotate the migration date now so that the October conversation is about performance rather than about why the numbers look strange. Agencies handling UK PPC accounts at scale should expect to answer this question several times over.

Practical considerations

A few caveats are worth stating plainly. Google's claim that migration happens in place with minimal volatility is a design intention, not a guarantee, and search term matching switching on is a real change in how the campaign acquires traffic. Expect some movement in impression volume and query mix, and give the campaigns a fortnight before drawing conclusions. Reacting on day three to a metric that has not stabilised is the most common way to make this kind of migration worse.

There is no described opt-out for the September phase, so treat it as compulsory. What remains under your control is the configuration afterwards: text customisation and final URL expansion are ordinary settings once a campaign is on AI Max, and both can be turned off. Final URL expansion is off by default for both migration groups, which is the sensible default and worth leaving alone unless there is a specific reason to change it.

Finally, anyone running scripts, bid management tools or third-party platforms against these accounts should check what those tools are still trying to create. Older API versions will keep accepting legacy broad match and automatically created assets settings until they reach their scheduled sunsets, which Google indicates will be around September 2027, but any API version released after 1 September 2026 removes the legacy entities entirely. Reference material for both retired features remains available in Google's own documentation for campaign-level broad match and automatically created assets.

Google has since confirmed a second change landing in the same window: from late September the campaign-level language targeting setting is removed from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns, which we cover in Google Ads removes campaign-level language targeting.

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