For twenty years, buying search advertising meant naming the searches you were willing to pay for. That arrangement is being withdrawn. Through September, Google upgraded a whole class of Search campaigns without asking. On 1 October, Microsoft removes a bidding control from new campaigns.
01 — What happened
On 12 August 2026, Google published the timetable on its Ads Developer Blog. From 1 to 30 September it automatically upgraded Search campaigns using campaign-level broad match or standalone automatically created assets (ACA) to AI Max. Campaigns were migrated in place — same IDs, budgets and bids — to “equivalent AI Max settings”, with search term matching switched on, and text customisation too where ACA had been used.
The door had already been shut behind it. Since 3 August 2026, creating new campaign-level broad match or legacy ACA set-ups has been blocked across the Google Ads interface, Ads Editor and every version of the API.
Dynamic Search Ads were excluded from the September run, but only for now. Google is showing in-account banners urging a voluntary one-click upgrade; automatic migration runs from 1 to 28 February 2027, after which new DSA ad groups cannot be created and unmigrated ones become standard Search ad groups with AI Max enabled.
AI Max bundles three things: search term matching, which reaches queries beyond your keyword list; text customisation, which generates ad copy from your existing assets and site; and final URL expansion, which sends a click to whichever page the platform judges the better match.
Microsoft is moving the same way on its own timetable. On 27 August 2026 it made AI Max for Search — the same three features — available to all advertisers, enabled by default on new Search campaigns and switched on automatically for existing campaigns already using predictive matching or autogenerated text assets. Four days later it confirmed that from 1 October 2026 the Max CPC setting disappears for new non-portfolio campaigns using Maximise Conversions with target CPA, Maximise Conversion Value with target ROAS, or Maximise Clicks. Existing campaigns and portfolio bid strategies keep it; new ones do not.
Both publish numbers worth reading closely. Google says AI Max campaigns see “an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS” using the full feature suite — but the comparison is against search term matching alone, not a conventional keyword campaign. Microsoft reports at least an 8% conversion increase against controls with AI Max disabled, and a spend-weighted uplift of about 13.6% across 44 advertisers tested between June and August 2026 — advertisers who chose to join a pilot.
02 — Why it matters
The feature being retired is not really a feature. It is the advertiser’s ability to declare in advance which searches they are willing to buy.
A keyword with a match type was a contract. You stated the demand you wanted, the platform charged you for matching it, and the search terms report told you whether it had kept its side. You could be wrong — but specifically wrong, and correctable in an afternoon.
What replaces it is a different arrangement. You describe the destination — a conversion, a target cost, a landing page, a set of assets — and the platform chooses the route.
Three things follow. You can no longer pre-declare what you will not pay for, only exclude it afterwards through negative keywords and brand exclusions, which both platforms kept. Your website stops being where traffic lands and becomes part of what decides it, because final URL expansion reads your pages. And the one input that still steers the system is the conversion you report back.
That last one is where most businesses are weakest, and it has just become the most consequential setting in the account.
03 — The economics
Two cost lines move in opposite directions, and a third appears.
The labour of managing keyword structures falls. Building and pruning match-type hierarchies, splitting ad groups by theme, chasing long-tail variants — that work is being deleted rather than automated, a real saving for anyone paying by the hour for it.
Wasted spend becomes harder to prevent. Under keywords, irrelevant traffic was a mistake you had made. Now it is a decision the platform made for you, visible only in the search terms report, after the money has gone.
The third line is the one worth budgeting for: the cost of telling the truth about your conversions.
Take an illustrative service business — say 200 form fills a month from paid search, of which 60 become qualified opportunities and 12 become customers. If the only conversion the ad platform receives is “form submitted”, all 200 are worth the same to the model, and the automation will do exactly what it is asked: find more of the cheapest ones. Over a few months that means more of the enquiries that convert least, because those are the ones it can buy most efficiently.
Now suppose the same business feeds back “qualified opportunity” and “customer”, with values attached, from its CRM. The automation is unchanged; the targeting instruction is completely different. It is buying towards 12 outcomes rather than 200 clicks on a button.
The gap between those two set-ups is not 7% or 8%. It is the difference between optimising towards a proxy and optimising towards revenue — and it widens as the platform takes more control, because there is less else left to adjust.
04 — What businesses should do
Establish whether you were migrated. Campaigns using campaign-level broad match or standalone ACA were upgraded somewhere between 1 and 30 September. Compare your search terms report for August against October, not week against week — the rollout was progressive, so a mid-September comparison mixes both regimes.
If you still run Dynamic Search Ads, move on your own schedule. You have until February 2027. Taking the one-click upgrade in a quiet period, budgets held flat, buys a clean read on what changed. Being auto-migrated during a busy trading month does not.
Rebuild your exclusion lists before you need them. Negative keywords, brand exclusions and URL rules are the controls you kept, and they now do the job your match types did.
Audit anything that touches the API. Scripts, bid tools and reporting integrations that create or edit the legacy entities fail on API versions released after 1 September, and stop working entirely when older versions sunset around September 2027.
Then fix the conversion definition, which matters more than all of the above. If your ad platform only knows a form was submitted, and your CRM knows which of those was worth having, the two need connecting. Both Google and Microsoft accept offline conversion imports for exactly this: you send back the outcome, with a value, against the original click. Microsoft’s documentation sets out the shape of the job — capture the click ID on the landing page, store it against the lead record, upload inside the 90-day conversion window, and do it daily, because it warns that infrequent uploads can damage automated bidding. It is simply nobody’s job in most businesses.
If you spend very little on search, do less, not more. Automation needs volume to learn from. Below a steady monthly flow of conversions there is not enough signal to improve on. Keep the account simple, keep exclusions tight, and put the effort into follow-up speed instead.
05 — Where technology fits
This is not an AI problem. The AI is the platform’s, it is already built, and you are not going to out-model Google. It is a plumbing and definitions problem, and what applies depends on where you start.
If you already run a CRM that records lead source and outcome, the work is an integration: passing the click identifier through your forms into the CRM, and pushing qualified and closed-won outcomes back to the ad platforms on a schedule. That is a small, well-understood build with an unusually direct return — it changes what the largest automated system in your marketing is optimising towards.
If your enquiries land in a shared inbox or a spreadsheet, no integration will help yet — there is no record to send back. The first job is a place where a lead has a state and an outcome: a systems problem before an advertising one, and the reason a CRM on its own is not a growth strategy.
If your forms, CRM and ad accounts are three separate worlds nobody reconciles, you are already paying for that gap as disconnected systems — and now as wasted ad spend too.
And if search ads are a minor line for you, do nothing here. You need to build nothing, and certainly no AI system of your own.
06 — RevenueStack’s take
Our view: the significant development is not that Google and Microsoft built better matching. It is that the conversion definition has quietly become the most important setting in a business’s marketing — and it lives in a CRM nobody thought of as a marketing system.
The skill in paid search was knowing which words to buy. That skill is being deprecated on a published timetable, and what replaces it is not an advertising skill at all. It is the operational discipline of knowing, quickly and reliably, which enquiries were worth having — and being able to say so in a format a machine can read.
Businesses that can answer it will get more from automated advertising than they ever got from manual targeting, because the automation is good and is now pointed at something real. Businesses that cannot will find the same automation extremely efficient at buying them work they do not want. The platforms have not taken your control away. They have moved it somewhere most businesses have never instrumented — and the same shift is coming to how AI assistants find you in the first place.
Sources
- Migrate Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets to AI Max — Google Ads Developer Blog, 2026-08-12
- Google's Dynamic Search Ads are upgrading to AI Max — Google, 2026-06-11
- AI Max for Search is now available — Microsoft Advertising, 2026-08-27
- AI Max for Search and other product news for August 2026 — Microsoft Advertising, 2026-08-31
- Microsoft Advertising Rolls Out AI Max Globally — Search Engine Journal, 2026-08-19
- Google Ads To Migrate Automatically Created Assets & Campaign-Level Broad Match To AI Max September 1 — Search Engine Roundtable, 2026-08-07
- Tracking offline conversions — Microsoft Learn, 2026-07-27
- About offline conversion imports — Google Ads Help, 2026-09-29
