One year after Google launched its AI Max Search ad format, our ads specialists analyzed what’s actually working, and what isn’t.
Three out of four Google Ads accounts that turn on AI Max for Search see no meaningful change in performance. That split hasn’t moved in the year since launch. It isn’t a warning about the tool. It’s a symptom of skipping the parts of the job that were never the algorithm’s to do.
AI Max is reliable enough to run the mechanical side of a Search campaign on its own: finding new customer searches, writing ad copy, and sending clicks to the right page. It can’t judge if your tracking is accurate, if your landing pages are good enough to expand from, or if your account has the volume to make expansion worthwhile. Those calls are yours, before you switch it on and after.
What’s changed isn’t the gap between accounts that win and accounts that don’t. It’s how clearly you can now see which side of that gap you’re on, and why.
AI Max is Google’s one-click bundle for Search campaigns. Turn it on and three things start happening at once: it bids on searches outside your keyword list, it writes new headlines and descriptions using your own website as source material, and it sends each click to whichever page on your site looks most likely to convert. The idea is to automate work that used to take an account manager hours every week: finding new demand, drafting copy, and matching pages to intent.
What Google’s AI Max can already do really well
AI Max earned the right to run three things unsupervised over its first year.
- Finding searches you’d never have thought to target.
It finds customers searching in ways you’d never have guessed to bid on, based on intent rather than the exact words you typed into your keyword list. You get more reach than you could build by hand, but you lose the ability to predict exactly what will trigger your ad tomorrow, since Google doesn’t publish the logic behind it. What you get instead is a clear report of what keyword triggered your ad. - Writing ad copy straight from your own site.
It drafts headlines and descriptions straight from your website, then tests them against what your own team wrote. You can now see exactly how each version performs, down to conversion value, so a weak line is a five-minute fix in a report instead of a guess. - Routing each click to the page most likely to convert it.
It decides which page on your site a click lands on, the same job Dynamic Search Ads used to do. This is the least mature of the three. You can see where a click landed after the fact, but you still can’t audit every routing decision as it happens, so set your exclusions before you turn this on, not after you spot a problem.
What you still need to do yourself
None of that mechanical skill fixes a bad starting point. Everything AI Max produces depends on decisions you make before you turn it on, and choices you keep making afterward.
- Setting the boundaries it has to stay inside.
Exclusions and negative keywords tell the algorithm where it can’t go. They say nothing about what it does inside those boundaries, which is why they need setting before you activate anything. - Giving it a strong enough starting point to work from.
An account with too few conversions, a brand-only campaign, or thin landing pages gives the algorithm nothing useful to expand into. - Reviewing what it actually did.
Better reporting over the past year means you can now see which searches it added and which ad lines are actually working. That review still has to happen weekly and monthly. Nobody has automated the decision to remove a bad headline or add a negative keyword, and nobody’s going to.
Our Verdict on AI Max?
The real change this year isn’t a smarter algorithm. It’s Google opening up its black box to enable reporting that’s good enough for auditing. A year ago, running AI Max meant trusting it, because you couldn’t see enough to do anything else. Now you can see what it expanded into, what it wrote, and where it sent people. That turns AI Max into something you can actually manage.
That management/guardrail job won’t stay this heavy forever. Google ships updates to AI Max on a rolling basis, and the underlying models improve with each one. The version you tested in December 2025 isn’t the version running today, and the version running in six months won’t be the one running now. That’s the case for checking back in every couple of months instead of testing once and filing the result away for good.
Your Next Steps for AI Max for Search
If you haven’t tested AI Max, there’s no reason left to wait. The format is stable, and Dynamic Search Ads are being replaced by AI Max Ads anyway. If you already tested it and got nothing back, check whether your tracking, landing pages, and negative keywords were actually in place before writing it off for good.
If you want a straight answer on whether your account is ready before you flip the switch, that’s the audit we run with clients first. Get in touch and we’ll tell you honestly.
