There are two deadlines attached to Google's AI Max rollout, and most advertisers only know about the one that got pushed back.
That is the problem. The deadline everybody read about moved to February 2027. The one nobody talks about is still September 2026, which is a few weeks away.
If your account uses automatically created assets or campaign level broad match, the change is landing on you first. Here is what is happening, what it does to a Search campaign, and what to do before Google makes the decision for you.
What AI Max actually is
AI Max is not a new campaign type. It is a set of AI powered targeting and creative features that sit inside a standard Google Search campaign.
It reached general availability on 15 April 2026 after roughly eleven months in beta. The main components:
- Search term matching, which expands the queries your ads can appear for using real time signals rather than your keyword list alone
- Final URL expansion, which lets Google send traffic to the page on your site it judges most relevant, rather than the landing page you set
- AI generated ad text and assets, built from your landing pages and existing copy
Unlike Performance Max, AI Max stays inside Search and keeps query level reporting. That distinction matters. You can still see what people searched, which is the single biggest complaint advertisers had about Performance Max.
Google announced this and a wider set of AI advertising changes at Google Marketing Live 2026 on 20 May 2026, alongside new ad formats built for AI Mode and a Gemini powered assistant called Ask Advisor.
The two deadlines, clearly
This is where accounts get caught out.
September 2026. Automatically created assets and campaign level broad match settings begin transitioning to AI Max. This date has not moved.
February 2027. Dynamic Search Ads campaigns are automatically migrated. This was originally September 2026 and Google pushed it back in June 2026 after advertiser feedback, partly to avoid disrupting the Q4 trading period. Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed the extension publicly.
Between now and January 2027 you can still create DSA campaigns and run tests. That creation ability is removed in January 2027, immediately before the automatic migration begins.
One more change worth knowing. AI Max is now switched on by default when you create a new Search campaign. Google reported faster first conversions during testing, particularly in the first fortnight after launch. You can turn it off if you want a more traditional setup, but you need to know it is on.
Why Australian advertisers should care more than most
Australia is an expensive search market for its size. The IAB Australia Internet Advertising Revenue Report prepared by PwC put Search and Directories spend at $2.16 billion in the March quarter of 2026 alone, up 13.9 per cent year on year and holding roughly 44 per cent of total internet advertising expenditure. IAB Australia noted growth was coming from a broader base of advertisers than previously.
More competitors bidding, in a country with a small population and concentrated capital city markets. That combination means a matching change that widens your query reach costs money faster here than it does in a large market with cheap long tail inventory.
For a Melbourne trades business spending $3,000 a month, a week of unmonitored query expansion is a meaningful chunk of the quarter.
What can go wrong, honestly
Google's messaging is about capturing more of the expanding search universe. That is true. It is also true that expansion has a cost, and lead generation accounts feel it differently to ecommerce ones.
The three risks worth planning for:
Broader matching brings broader intent. Search term matching finds queries your keywords never covered. Some of those are valuable. Some are people researching, comparing or looking for something adjacent. In a lead gen account, that shows up as more form fills of lower quality rather than fewer conversions, which is harder to spot in a dashboard.
Final URL expansion can send traffic to the wrong page. If your site has thin service pages, old blog posts or location pages that were never finished, Google may choose them. Google has said reporting improvements for final URL expansion are coming, which is an acknowledgement that visibility here has been limited.
Your legacy settings carry over untouched. AI Max mirrors your existing configuration. If you never set brand exclusions, never added negative keyword lists, or never cleaned up your audience signals, those gaps migrate with you. The migration does not fix anything. It amplifies whatever is already there.
What to do before September
Work through these in order. Most accounts can complete the list in a day.
Find out which deadline applies to you
Check whether your campaigns use automatically created assets or campaign level broad match. If yes, September is your date. Check separately for Dynamic Search Ads campaigns, which are on the February 2027 clock. Plenty of accounts have both.
Set brand exclusions before anything expands
Decide whether you want AI Max bidding on your own brand terms and on competitor brand terms, then configure it deliberately. This is the single most common source of wasted spend after a migration, and it takes ten minutes to prevent.
Clean your negative keyword lists
Pull your search terms report for the last ninety days and build out negatives properly. Job seekers, DIY researchers, free service seekers, wrong states, wrong service types. A broader matching system needs a stronger fence.
Audit your landing pages before enabling URL expansion
Look at every page final URL expansion could reasonably send traffic to. If a page is thin, outdated or does not convert, either fix it or exclude it. This is usually where a migration quietly loses money, and it is a website problem rather than an ads problem.
Run a side by side test rather than a switch
Use the voluntary upgrade tools and test AI Max against your current setup on comparable campaigns. Give it enough budget and enough time to leave the learning period. Google recommends manual upgrades over waiting for the automatic transition, and it is right about that, because you keep control of the settings and the historical reporting.
Track lead quality, not just conversions
Import offline conversions if you can, or at minimum have someone score enquiries weekly. Cost per lead falling while cost per customer rises is the pattern to watch for. You will not see it in the Google Ads interface.
The measurement point that matters most
Independent results from AI Max have been mixed rather than uniformly positive. Some accounts see revenue lift with a higher cost per acquisition. Return on ad spend moves in both directions depending on the account.
That is an argument for measuring your own account rather than trusting a platform average. It is also an argument for not leaving the configuration to a default setting on a date somebody else chose.
If you are weighing how much of your budget should sit in paid search at all versus organic, our comparison of how SEO and Google Ads returns differ covers that trade off in more detail. This change does not alter the fundamentals of that decision, but it does raise the cost of running paid search carelessly.
Getting ahead of the migration
The businesses that come out of this well will be the ones that migrated on their own terms with clean settings, tested properly, and knew what a good lead costs them before the matching widened.
Cubic Digital manages Google Ads campaigns for Australian businesses and is working through AI Max migrations with accounts now, alongside the broader search engine marketing picture. We audit the account, set the exclusions, test against your current structure and report on lead quality rather than raw conversion counts.
If you would like someone to check what is about to change in your account before September, request a quote and we will take a look.
