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AI Max migration: two deadlines, and the baseline to capture before September

AI Max for Search is Google's AI feature suite for Search campaigns: search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion, layered onto standard campaigns. It reached general availability on April 15, 2026, it is now the default for newly created Search campaigns, and Google is retiring three legacy configurations into it on two different clocks.

The delay everyone celebrated covers the smaller deadline

On June 11, Google's Ads Liaison announced the DSA auto-migration moves from September 2026 to February 2027, and DSA campaign creation reopened June 15. Most of the coverage read as "the AI Max migration is delayed." It is not, for most accounts. The same announcement confirmed that ACA and campaign-level broad match remain on the original September 2026 schedule, and new DSA creation ends permanently in January 2027.

So there are two clocks. September 2026 for ACA and campaign-level broad match. February 2027 for DSA. An account can be on both clocks at once, and plenty are on the September one without realizing it, because broad match plus Smart Bidding is the quiet default configuration of a lot of Search accounts built in the last three years.

What the auto-upgrade actually turns on

Per Google's own migration notes: broad-match campaigns upgrade with search term matching enabled. ACA campaigns upgrade with search term matching and text customization enabled. DSA campaigns, when their turn comes, get all three features including final URL expansion, with legacy URL controls preserved, and legacy DSAs keep serving until the replacement ads pass policy review, which means a window where two ad versions can run at once.

The defaults are built for the average account. They do not know about the negative keyword architecture you spent a year tuning, the compliance language your vertical requires in every headline, or the landing pages you deliberately keep paid traffic away from. Voluntary early migration exists precisely so those decisions get made by you instead of inherited from a default.

Read the performance claims carefully

Google's headline figure is an average 7% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS. The comparison behind it is full-suite AI Max against matching-only AI Max, not AI Max against DSA, and independent analyses note it excludes retail. Independent results run wide in both directions: one large query-level analysis (SMEC) measured meaningful revenue lift alongside a higher CPA, and at least one published agency case found the overwhelming majority of AI Max-matched terms produced no conversions at all. The honest read is variance, not uniform lift, with the best outcomes clustering in accounts that already have clean conversion tracking and defined guardrails.

Which is exactly why the account-specific answer matters more than the benchmark.

The baseline argument

Here is the part that does not get enough attention: after migration, more of your query data sits below privacy thresholds and never appears in the search terms report. The reporting becomes more of a partial black box than DSA was. Whatever you can see about your account's behavior today, you may not be able to reconstruct after the flip.

That makes the pre-migration snapshot the highest-leverage two hours available before September. Capture, at minimum: the full search terms report by match type with converting terms flagged, the keyword list with match types, asset-level and RSA performance, the complete conversion action configuration, negative keyword lists and brand exclusions, and any URL rules. Store it outside the platform.

Then, after the flip, the same pull again. The diff between the two is the only honest way to attribute a performance change to the migration rather than to seasonality, Q4, or anything else that moved in the same window. The 2022 Smart Shopping to Performance Max transition taught this lesson the hard way: accounts that migrated late hit learning periods during peak season with no clean before-picture to argue from.

This is a two-hour job with a live query layer against the account, and a much longer one without it, which is most of why we built one. Read: the Google Ads MCP →

What to do, by situation

Running campaign-level broad match or ACA: your clock is September. Migrate voluntarily before it, after taking the baseline, so the feature defaults are your choices. Running DSA: you have until February 2027 and creation is open again, which makes a controlled side-by-side experiment possible right now; use the runway to test, not to wait. Running neither: nothing forces you, but AI Max is already the default on new Search campaigns, so the baseline habit still applies the day you build one.