If you’ve been running Google Ads for any length of time, you already know the drill. Google rolls out a new feature, calls it the future, and nine months later they roll out another one. The latest is AI Max. And starting in September, Google is auto-upgrading Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns to it across the board.
That’s the short version. Here’s what it actually means.
First, What Are Dynamic Search Ads?
You may not even know if you’re running them.
Dynamic Search Ads are a campaign type where you give Google your website, and Google decides which searches to show your ads on. It reads your pages, builds its own headlines, and serves up ads on whatever search terms it thinks match your content. No keywords from you. No headlines from you. Google does it.
The pitch was always “set it and forget it.” Sometimes that worked. Often it spent budget on the wrong things because Google interpreted the website differently to how the business owner did. DSA was never the right setup for most small businesses, so if you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone.
What is AI Max?
AI Max is Google’s replacement for DSA. Same general idea, more AI in the middle.
You give Google your ads and website content. Google’s AI layers on top, finds queries you didn’t think to target, customises ad text on the fly, and can expand the URLs your ads send people to. According to Google’s own numbers, AI Max delivers around 7% more conversions at a similar cost per acquisition compared to running standard search campaigns alone.
A few important details:
- AI Max has only been around for about a year. It went from beta to “everyone gets this” in 2026. That doesn’t mean it stays in this form forever. Google keeps moving the goalposts. Whatever this looks like today, expect it to look different in twelve months.
- From September 2026, you can’t create new DSA campaigns in Google Ads, Editor, or the API. Existing ones get migrated.
- Same migration applies to broad-match Search campaigns and any campaigns using automatically created assets.
Yes, AI Max Ads Can Show Inside AI Overviews
This is the question most people ask, so I’ll answer it directly. Yes. Google has rolled out paid placements that appear above, below, and in some cases inside the AI-generated answer at the top of search results. The catch: your campaigns need to be opted in to AI Max for that ad slot to be on the table at all. If you’re still running standard search campaigns the old way, you’re not in the running.
So how do you get your ads into that block?
There’s no toggle that says “show me here.” Once you’re opted in to AI Max, Google decides based on what it thinks is relevant to the AI summary it just generated. The way you give yourself the best shot is to make sure the content Google is feeding into the AI is your content. That means:
- Your website’s actual content matches what your customers search for.
- Your ads and landing pages tell a clear, consistent story.
- Your business is the kind of credible, well-structured source the AI wants to cite.
It’s not magic. It’s the same fundamentals, with more weight than they used to carry.
Your Website Content Just Got More Important
Here’s the part that gets glossed over.
AI Max combines what you give Google with what Google scrapes off your website. The richer the signals, the better Google’s targeting. The downside: if your website is out of date, that out-of-date content ends up in your ads.
If your old “about us” page still says you’re a two-person operation when you’re now a team of twelve. If your service pages list products you stopped selling last year. If your homepage has a discontinued offer in the headline. All of that becomes feedstock for Google’s AI to build your campaigns from.
Even with the current ad systems, before AI Max, Google regularly comes up with interesting interpretations of the assets it scrapes. We’ve seen it pull pricing from an outdated promo, generate headlines from blog comments, and confidently advertise services that the business doesn’t even offer anymore.
With AI Max, those interpretations get faster, broader, and harder to manually unwind. Your website becomes part of your ad creative whether you signed off on it or not.
The Authority Problem
By default at cloudclicks®, we don’t give Google permission to spin up ads on its own. Every new ad goes through review and approval. Every new asset gets checked. Every new URL gets sanity-tested before Google can send paid traffic to it.
It’s a small piece of friction, and it saves a lot of money.
There’s a story we tell people new to running ads. A business owner set up a Google Ads account years ago. They gave Google the keywords, the landing page URL, and the credit card details. They never logged back in. Google kept the campaigns running. The credit card kept getting charged. And it wasn’t until a bookkeeper queried the recurring spend that they realised Google had been running their ads on its own for years.
That’s the extreme version. The everyday version is more subtle. You let Google generate the ad copy. Google does its best. Your customers see headlines that don’t quite match your business. The campaign runs. The clicks come in. The conversions disappoint. And nobody notices that the copy in the ad was the problem.
AI Max isn’t going to make this less common. It’s going to make it more common, faster.
What To Do Before September
If you’re managing your own account, three things to check this month:
- Audit your website content for anything out of date, off-brand, or incorrect. Google’s AI is about to start using it as ad material.
- Find out if you’re running DSA campaigns today. Look for campaigns labelled “Dynamic” or ad groups with no keywords. They’re the ones getting auto-migrated.
- Turn off “automatically created assets” anywhere you haven’t already, unless you’re actively reviewing what Google generates.
If you’re running ads with someone else, ask them what their plan is. The good ones already have one.
If you’re not sure, or you’d rather have someone else worry about this kind of thing, get in touch. We sort it out for our clients as a matter of course. Happy to do the same for you.