Google is upgrading your Search campaigns whether you asked or not

What is actually changing, with dates

Three things, and it helps to keep them separate because they arrive on different days and do different things.

AI Max for Search, forced on some campaigns from 1 September 2026. Google is automatically upgrading Search campaigns that use campaign-level broad match or standalone automatically created assets, per Search Engine Land's report on the migration timeline. If your campaign used either of those, it is on AI Max now or will be shortly.

Dynamic Search Ads, delayed to February 2027. These were due in the same wave. On 11 June Google pushed their automatic migration to 1–28 February 2027 after advertisers objected to a fourth-quarter change, and the ability to create new DSA ad groups goes at the same time — see Google's own announcement. In-account notices start this month.

Display campaigns folding into Demand Gen, later this year. In Google's wording, reported by Two Octobers, "Display, as we have come to know it, will be deprecating later this year and that display ads will then run inside Demand Gen campaigns."

What AI Max does to a Search campaign

AI Max is a campaign-level setting that lets Google broaden keyword matching, write headlines and descriptions itself, and send people to whichever page on your site it decides matches their intent.

Each of those is a control you used to hold. Read again: it can match your ad to queries you never bid on, write copy you never approved, and land people on a page you never chose. That is not a criticism — done well it finds demand you would have missed. It is a description of where the risk now lives.

The two settings that matter most:

Final URL expansion. This is the one that sends people to pages you did not pick. If your site has a careers page, an old product page, a blog post about a competitor — AI Max can land a paid click there. Either exclude those URLs explicitly, or turn expansion off. Leaving it on default and hoping is how a search for your product ends up on a page about your holiday hours, which is exactly the mismatch that kills the conversion.

Brand controls. AI Max can broaden into competitor and brand-adjacent queries. Decide, deliberately, which brand terms you do and do not want to appear for, and set the inclusions and exclusions. Do not inherit the default.

The report you now cannot skip

With matching broadened, the search terms report stops being a monthly hygiene task and becomes the steering wheel. It is where you find out what AI Max decided your ad was for.

Read it weekly for the first two months after the upgrade. Expect more terms, some of them excellent and some of them nonsense, and expect the nonsense to be plausible-looking rather than obvious. Negative keywords are how you push back, and they are the only manual lever left that Google has not softened. How to read the search terms report covers the method; the change is only that the stakes went up.

Display into Demand Gen: what it means for a small budget

Demand Gen campaigns run across YouTube, Discover, Gmail and the Display network from one campaign with a shared budget and Google's AI deciding the split. Two Octobers also reports that Google's recommended daily budget for Demand Gen has been reduced from "$100/day or 20× your target CPA" to ten times target CPA — which brings it within reach of more Indian businesses than before.

The trade is the same as everywhere else this year: less control over where the money goes, in exchange for the system optimising across surfaces you would not have managed separately. For an awareness or remarketing budget that was running on plain Display, it is probably an upgrade. For a budget that needed to stay off YouTube for a reason, you now need exclusions rather than a separate campaign.

The quiet change that hurts offline businesses

Also reported in the same September roundup: conversions uploaded more than seven days after they happened will still appear in standard reports, but data-driven attribution will ignore them.

For a business whose real conversion is a dealer visit, a phone enquiry closed a fortnight later, or a sale entered into a CRM at month end, this matters more than any of the headline changes. If your offline conversions reach Google late, the bidding system will optimise as though they never happened — and steadily move budget toward the fast, online, lower-value conversion it can see. Fixing it means getting conversion data uploaded within the week, which is a process problem before it is a Google problem.

What to do this week

None of this requires an agency — it is the first hour of any digital marketing engagement, not the whole of it. All of it requires somebody to actually open the account, which is the step most businesses skip until the search terms report has been feeding nonsense for a quarter — the same pattern as buying clicks on your own brand name and only noticing at renewal.

• Check which Search campaigns used campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets. Those are the ones being upgraded. Open each and confirm AI Max's settings rather than assuming.
• Set final URL exclusions or switch expansion off on every upgraded campaign.
• Set brand inclusions and exclusions deliberately.
• Put the search terms report on a weekly calendar for the next eight weeks, with negative keyword additions as the output.
• Decide what happens to DSA campaigns before February, rather than letting the migration decide for you.
• If you upload offline conversions, get them inside seven days, or accept that bidding will ignore them.