Google Ads Is Auto-Migrating Search Campaigns to AI Max This Month: What to Check Before October

If you run Google Ads and have not looked at your Search campaigns this month, now is the time. Google began automatically converting older campaign set-ups to AI Max on 1 September 2026, and the process is rolling out gradually through the whole of the month. Most accounts will not receive a warning email. The campaign simply changes. This post explains what is being migrated, which settings Google says will carry over, what will not exist any more, and a short list of checks worth running before October. All dates and details below come from Search Engine Land's report of 14 August 2026 and Google's own developer announcement.

What Google is migrating in September

According to Search Engine Land, two legacy Search campaign features are being moved to AI Max automatically between 1 and 30 September 2026:

What is not moving yet

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are on a slower timetable. Search Engine Land reports that Google will start showing in-account notices from September encouraging advertisers to upgrade DSAs to AI Max voluntarily, send reminder notifications on 15 January 2027, and then migrate DSAs automatically during February 2027. At that point the ability to create new DSA ad groups is removed for good. If DSAs do meaningful work in your account, particularly for large product catalogues or content-heavy sites, you have about five months to decide whether to move early on your own terms or wait for the automatic switch.

The key dates in one place

Why this matters more than it sounds

On paper, "migrated in place with equivalent settings" sounds like nothing changes. In practice, AI Max is a broader, automation-led set-up than the individual features it replaces, combining wider search-term matching with automatically generated ad text. A campaign that was running broad match with tightly controlled ad copy is now running under a system built to expand on both fronts. That is not automatically bad, and for some accounts it will find conversions that keyword targeting missed. But the migration is happening in the busiest quarter of the year for most UK advertisers, and a campaign that quietly starts matching to new queries in the run-up to Black Friday and Christmas needs someone watching it. We covered why Q4 planning should already be under way in our post on Black Friday 2026 PPC planning, and this migration is one more reason not to leave campaigns on autopilot.

Five checks worth running this month

How Clicks can help

Our pay per click management team in Cambridge can check your account for campaign-level broad match, automatically created assets and Dynamic Search Ads, and tell you plainly what the migration means for your spend. The free PPC audit we offer covers exactly these checks, and the same applies to businesses working with our PPC agency in Manchester. For businesses that want a dedicated Google Ads specialist rather than a full-service arrangement, our Google Ads management for Cambridge businesses is built around exactly this kind of platform change: reading the announcements, working out what they mean for your account, and making the adjustments before they cost you money. And if paid search is one part of a wider mix, our full-service digital agency in Cambridge can look at the whole picture. The migration is not optional and it is already under way. The only choice left is whether it happens with someone watching.