Google Ads AI Max Migration: What Auto-Upgrades September 1 and What to Audit Before It Hits

On September 1, 2026, Google Ads starts automatically migrating Search campaigns that use Campaign-level Broad Match or legacy Automatically Created Assets (ACA) to AI Max. Dynamic Search Ads follow in February 2027. If any of your accounts run these legacy structures, you have under three weeks to audit them, decide whether you migrate or get migrated, and set the right guardrails before the system takes over.

We manage Google Ads accounts for ecommerce and lead-gen clients, and this week the work changed overnight: we are no longer just optimizing campaigns — we are deciding which ones survive Google's September. Because this is not a minor settings change. It is the end of the classic Search campaign as we have operated it for fifteen years.

What AI Max is (and why Google makes it the default)

AI Max is Google's AI-powered Search campaign format, generally available since April 2026. In practice, it is the evolution of Dynamic Search Ads: instead of relying only on your landing page content, it combines your ads and website with real-time intent signals to find queries your keyword campaigns are not capturing.

It ships with three features you can toggle:

1. Search term matching — expands query coverage beyond your keywords.
2. Text customization — adapts the ad copy to the query.
3. Final URL expansion — generates and tests destination URL combinations.

Google's headline stat: per its internal data, advertisers using the full feature suite see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA/ROAS than those using search term matching alone. And this is no longer beta scale: hundreds of thousands of advertisers already run AI Max.

The timeline, confirmed by Google (announced April 15, updated June 11) and detailed by Search Engine Land on August 14, looks like this:

What carries over and what changes

The good news: Google migrates campaigns "in place" with equivalent settings. Brand inclusions and exclusions transfer automatically, DSA URL controls are preserved, and AI Max features are enabled to mirror your legacy setup (ACA users get search term matching and text customization; broad match users get search term matching).

The bad news has three parts:

1. You can no longer create legacy structures. Creating Campaign-level Broad Match and legacy ACA has been blocked since August 3. New DSA campaigns become impossible in February 2027.
2. API versions released after September 1 drop support for legacy entity types. If your agency or your scripts depend on them, the deadline is non-negotiable.
3. Bid targets and budgets are inherited as-is. AI Max does not re-optimize your objectives; it migrates with whatever the campaign has. And this is where the migration collides with the other change happening in August.

The August collision: bid targets become a ceiling

On August 17 — two weeks before this migration starts — Google changed how bidding behaves on Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns marked "Limited by budget": they stop overdelivering and converge to the target you set (we covered it in depth in our analysis of the bidding change).

The combination is dangerous: if your campaign has been "winning" for months at a $5 actual CPA against a $10 target, on August 17 the system starts spending toward 10. And when that campaign migrates to AI Max in September, it inherits the inflated target. Two Google changes in three weeks — and the second one carries the baggage of the first.

So in the accounts we manage, the working order is: fix bid targets to business reality first (not to historical overdelivery), then plan the migration. If you do it in reverse, you migrate into AI Max with a target that was already wrong.

The five-point audit before September 1

This is what we are doing on every client account this week:

1. Inventory legacy structures. Filter by campaign type and export via API: how many campaigns use Campaign-level Broad Match? How many run legacy ACA? How many depend on DSA as a safety net? Do not assume you know — in an ecommerce account we audited last week there were 14 DSA campaigns nobody on the team remembered creating.

2. Decide: voluntary or forced migration. Migrating yourself gives you control over the final configuration; waiting means Google replicates your legacy setup, mistakes included. Google offers one-click experiments to test AI Max impact before migrating — we are using them on accounts with meaningful budgets so the call is data-driven, not faith-driven.

3. Set guardrails before, not after. Brand exclusions, location controls and text guidelines are the levers you actually have left to "steer" the AI in AI Max. If you leave them for after migration, AI Max will have already learned from a period without them. The control window is now.

4. Review scripts, tooling and API connections. Any automation that creates or edits campaigns with legacy ACA or Broad Match structures will break. For us, that meant reviewing the optimization scripts we run on larger accounts and the connector that feeds our reporting. Old API versions live until ~September 2027, but new versions simply will not let you touch legacy entities.

5. Review budgets and bid targets. As I said: AI Max inherits whatever the campaign has. If the target is wrong, you migrate the problem. Fix it now, because bidding already behaves differently after August 17.

Google is not alone: the AI-by-default campaign stack

Worth zooming out. Meta has been pushing its automation through Advantage+ (how its creative automation works) and its Andromeda algorithm now concentrates budget on whatever the AI decides (and how you fix that). TikTok does the same with Smart+. Now Google closes the circle: all three major platforms converge on the same model — you bring data, creative and guardrails; the system decides where, when and to whom ads show.

What makes Google different is that it does not just offer this: it imposes it on a calendar. And that changes the nature of SEM work:

What this means in practice

My honest take: Google has been signaling this for years. What changed is that the signal now has a date. Keyword campaigns are not disappearing, but account structure stops being your main lever: if AI Max finds queries for you, your competitive edge moves to three places — the quality of your feed and site (the raw material AI Max reads), your bid targets (now a ceiling, not a suggestion), and your brand guardrails (the only thing stopping the AI from spending where it should not).

For brands, the recommendation is simple: do not wait to be migrated. Migrate yourself, with one-click experiments, adjusted targets and guardrails in place. September cannot be postponed — but it can be prepared.

And if your account still lives off DSA as a safety net, February 2027 arrives faster than it looks: start building the equivalent AI Max structure now, while you can still do it calmly instead of under pressure.

At Mintec we run Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok campaigns for clients across LatAm and Spain. Want us to audit your account before the September migration? Reach out.