Summary. Google is not migrating your Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max in September 2026. That date moved. DSA automigration now runs 1 to 28 February 2027, and the ability to create new DSA ad groups disappears permanently at the same time. Campaign-level broad match and legacy Automatically Created Assets kept the original September 2026 schedule. Most pages still published on this topic state one date for all three, which is wrong.
By Cody Wise, Founder, Wise Media, Calgary. Last updated 3 October 2026. Every date below is sourced to Google’s own announcements, linked in the Sources section.
What this article covers
- The confirmed migration timeline, split by feature
- What AI Max actually is, feature by feature
- Why the split timeline matters more than the dates
- What breaks when AI Max switches on unprepared
- The pre-migration audit, in order
- Migrate voluntarily or wait for the forced upgrade?
- Common mistakes
- FAQ
What is the real Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max migration deadline?
Dynamic Search Ads automigrate to AI Max between 1 and 28 February 2027. Reminder notices go to accounts with legacy DSAs on 15 January 2027. Campaign-level broad match and legacy Automatically Created Assets are on a separate, earlier schedule: creation blocked 3 August 2026, automatic migration through September 2026. One announcement, three features, two different deadlines.
| Date | What happens | Which feature |
|---|---|---|
| Week of 15 April 2026 | Voluntary one-click upgrades open | All three |
| 3 August 2026 | Creation of new campaign-level broad match and legacy ACA blocked across the interface, Google Ads Editor and the API | Broad match, ACA |
| 1 to 30 September 2026 | Automatic migration of broad match and ACA campaigns to AI Max | Broad match, ACA |
| September 2026 | In-account notices begin encouraging voluntary DSA upgrades. DSA creation ends. | DSA |
| 15 January 2027 | Reminder notifications to advertisers still running legacy DSAs | DSA |
| 1 to 28 February 2027 | Automatic DSA migration. Creating new DSA ad groups is permanently removed. | DSA |
| September 2027 | Older API versions supporting the legacy features reach scheduled sunset | All three |
Two things in that table deserve emphasis because they are routinely reported wrong.
First, September 2026 was the original DSA automigration date and it is no longer the date. It moved to February 2027 in an update dated 11 June 2026. If a page you are reading says your DSAs convert in September 2026, that page has not been touched since the spring and you should not plan a quarter around it.
Second, the extension applied to DSA only. Broad match at the campaign level and the legacy Automatically Created Assets setting went through on the original schedule. If your campaigns used either one, that migration has already happened. You are not waiting for it. You are living in it, and the February 2027 date is about a different part of your account.
Google also states that automigrated campaigns arrive with settings configured to mirror the legacy setup, including existing URL controls. That is reassuring and it is also the sentence that causes the most damage, because “mirrors your legacy setup” is not the same as “behaves the way your legacy campaign behaved.” More on that below.
What is AI Max for Search campaigns, exactly?
AI Max is a bundle of three targeting and creative features that sit inside an existing Search campaign. It is not a new campaign type, it does not require you to delete your keywords, and it is switched on at the campaign level. The three features are search term matching, text customization and Final URL expansion.
Search term matching
Google describes this as broad match, asset-based and landing-page-based technology working together. In practice it means your ads can serve on queries that no keyword in the account would have matched, because the system reads your assets and your landing pages as additional signals. Your keywords still exist and still carry priority. The campaign simply stops being limited to them.
Text customization
Google generates additional headlines and descriptions from your landing pages, your existing ads and your keywords. This is the feature that worries regulated advertisers, and it should. Generated copy is served in your name, under your account, making claims about your business.
Final URL expansion
Instead of always sending a click to the final URL you set, Google may send it to a different page on your domain when it judges that page more relevant to the query. Google’s documentation is explicit on two points most advertisers miss: Final URL expansion is enabled automatically when you opt a campaign into AI Max, and it is dependent on text customization. Turn text customization off and Final URL expansion turns off with it. The same dependency runs the other way for controls: URL exclusions require text customization to be enabled.
There is one more documented behaviour worth knowing before you migrate. When Final URL expansion selects an alternative URL, pinned assets in your Responsive Search Ads will not be used, because a pin written for one page may not match the intent of another. If your compliance language lives in a pinned headline, that is the exact scenario in which it silently stops appearing.
The controls you actually get
| Control | Level it applies at | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Brand inclusions | Campaign and ad group | Tie matching to specific brands you sell or represent |
| Brand exclusions | Campaign only | Keep your ads off competitor and unrelated brand queries |
| Locations of interest | Ad group | Reach people by the geography named in the query, not only where they are sitting |
| URL inclusions | Ad group | Point expansion at a defined set of pages |
| URL exclusions | Campaign only | Keep expansion off pages you never meant to advertise |
| Page feeds | Campaign | Supply a curated URL set rather than relying on Google reading your whole site |
Reporting changes too. The search terms report adds AI Max as a match type, plus a source column that tells you whether a match came from broad match or from keywordless matching, and it now shows the headline and URL served. That last addition is the one that makes AI Max auditable at all, so learn to read it before you need it.
Why does the split timeline matter more than the dates?
Because the two groups fail differently, and treating them as one event means you prepare for the wrong failure.
Broad match and ACA migrating in September 2026 was mostly a matching and asset-generation change inside campaigns that had already surrendered tight control. Advertisers who ran campaign-level broad match had already accepted loose query matching. The migration changed the mechanism, not the philosophy.
Dynamic Search Ads are different. A DSA campaign was a deliberate structure. You pointed it at a site or a page feed, you wrote dynamic headlines, and you used it to catch long-tail demand that keywords could not economically cover. When a DSA campaign becomes an AI Max campaign, the thing that changes is not your targeting philosophy. It is the landing page logic and the ad copy, both at once, in a campaign whose entire purpose was to automate landing page selection in a narrower way than AI Max does.
Google’s own figures suggest why it is pushing this. The AI Max launch announcement states a typical lift of 14 percent more conversions or conversion value at a similar cost per acquisition or return on ad spend, rising to 27 percent for campaigns using mostly exact and phrase keywords. The DSA upgrade announcement gives a narrower figure: campaigns using the full feature suite see an average of 7 percent more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS compared with using search term matching alone.
Read those three numbers together and a useful conclusion falls out. The largest reported gains are for accounts that were previously the most restricted. If your campaigns were already loose, expect less. If you were running tight exact-match structures, the upside is real and so is the risk, because you have further to fall.
What breaks when AI Max switches on without preparation?
Four failure modes, in the order we see them cause damage.
Traffic lands on pages you never meant to advertise
Final URL expansion reads your domain. Your domain contains more than your money pages. Careers pages, thank-you pages, old campaign landing pages, a blog post about a service you stopped offering, a client portal login, a pricing page you left published but no longer honour. Every one of those is a candidate destination the moment expansion is on.
This is the clearest argument for doing a content inventory before migration rather than after. URL exclusions only apply at campaign level, so you cannot quietly fix this in one ad group and move on. And remember the dependency: you need text customization enabled for URL exclusions to be available at all.
Brand terms leak in both directions
Keywordless matching can pull your ads onto competitor brand queries, which raises cost and in some categories raises a legal question. It can also pull generic campaigns onto your own brand queries, which cannibalises a channel you were probably measuring separately and makes your non-brand performance look better than it is.
Brand exclusions are campaign-level only. Build the exclusion list before migration, not in response to a search terms report three weeks later.
Generated copy makes claims you are accountable for
Text customization writes headlines and descriptions from your pages. If a page contains a superlative, a guarantee, a price, or a claim that was true in 2024, generated copy can surface it in an ad in 2027.
This matters more in Canada than the US-written guides suggest, because several of the categories that lean hardest on Dynamic Search Ads are regulated here. Mortgage brokerages, real estate brokerages, insurance, and health and wellness services all carry advertising obligations that sit with the advertiser, not with the platform that generated the sentence. If your category has required disclosures, assume generated copy will not include them, and assume a pinned headline carrying them will not be used when Final URL expansion picks a different page. We wrote about this exposure in detail for one of those categories in our guide to mortgage broker website compliance across Alberta, Ontario and BC, and the same logic applies to ad copy.
The practical control is the text guidelines setting plus a tight page inventory. The real control is editorial: fix the claims on the pages, because the pages are the source material.
Your optimization routine stops producing signal
If your weekly routine is keyword bid adjustments and negative keyword mining against exact-match data, that routine measures a shrinking share of your spend after migration. The replacement routine is different work: read the search terms report by source, read which URLs expansion chose, read asset-level performance rather than impression counts, and manage at the theme level instead of the keyword level.
Accounts that get hurt by AI Max are usually not hurt by AI Max. They are hurt by three months of running an automated campaign with a manual review process. If you are also watching cost per conversion climb for reasons unrelated to this migration, our breakdown of why Google Ads cost per conversion rose through 2026 separates the platform-level causes from the account-level ones.
The pre-migration audit, in order
Work this list top to bottom. Items one through four are the ones that prevent money being wasted. Items five through nine are the ones that let you tell whether the migration helped.
- Inventory every indexable URL on the domain. Export your sitemap. Mark each URL as advertise, never advertise, or unsure. The never-advertise list becomes your campaign-level URL exclusions. Anything in the unsure column defaults to excluded.
- Audit the claims on every advertise-column page. Prices, guarantees, superlatives, stated turnaround times, “as seen in” logos, out-of-date service lists. Text customization will read all of it. Fix or remove what you cannot stand behind today.
- Build the brand exclusion list. Competitors, adjacent brands you resell but do not want to bid on, and anything where appearing would be awkward. Campaign level, so one list per campaign.
- Decide your Final URL expansion posture per campaign. Full expansion, expansion limited by URL inclusions at ad group level, or a curated page feed with expansion off. Lead generation campaigns pointed at a single qualified form usually want the third option.
- Record a clean 30 to 90 day baseline. Conversions, conversion value, CPA, ROAS, impression share, and the share of conversions coming from brand versus non-brand queries. Without the brand split you will not be able to tell cannibalisation from growth.
- Confirm conversion tracking is actually trustworthy. AI Max optimises against the conversion signal you give it. A duplicated conversion action or a form thank-you page firing on page load will now cause more damage, faster.
- Check that your pinned assets are not load-bearing. If required disclosure language lives only in a pin, move it into the landing page and into every unpinned headline variant that could reasonably carry it.
- Set up a search terms review that someone will actually do. Weekly for the first month after migration, then fortnightly. Filter by the AI Max match type and read the source column.
- Run a one-click experiment rather than a hard switch. Google provides experiments for exactly this. A two to four week test against your existing structure gives you a defensible answer instead of a vibe.
If your site has not had a technical and content clean-up in the last year, this audit will surface work that belongs on the website rather than in the ad account. That is normal and it is not a detour. The ad account now reads the website as targeting data, which means site quality is campaign quality. Our website growth packages exist for exactly this overlap.
Should you migrate voluntarily or wait for the forced upgrade?
Migrate voluntarily, in an experiment, before January 2027. The only good reason to wait is that you have no capacity to monitor the account for a month, and in that case the honest answer is to get help rather than to let February happen to you.
| Approach | Advantages | Disadvantages | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voluntary upgrade now, via experiment | You choose the timing. You get a controlled comparison against your current structure. Problems surface while you still have a working fallback. | Requires attention for two to four weeks. Needs a clean baseline first. | Any account with meaningful spend and someone to watch it |
| Voluntary upgrade now, straight switch | Fastest. Captures any upside immediately. | No comparison data, so you cannot prove cause. Mistakes cost real money before you notice. | Small accounts where experiment traffic would not reach significance |
| Wait for automatic migration in February 2027 | No work required now. | You get Google’s default configuration during a month when every other advertiser is also adjusting. Your diagnosis competes with market-wide volatility. | Dormant or paused accounts only |
The argument for acting early is not that AI Max is better. It is that February 2027 is a bad month to be learning. Everyone migrates at once, auction dynamics shift while you are trying to read your own data, and you will be attempting to separate your configuration error from the market’s behaviour with no clean period to compare against. Doing it in October gives you a quiet room.
What to ask the agency running your account
- Which of our campaigns already migrated in September 2026, and what changed in performance?
- What is on our campaign-level URL exclusion list right now, and who wrote it?
- What is our brand exclusion list, and when was it last reviewed?
- Can you show me the search terms report filtered to the AI Max match type?
- Are we running an experiment before February 2027, and when does it start?
- Which pinned assets carry compliance language, and what happens to them under Final URL expansion?
If those questions produce vague answers, that is useful information about the account, not about AI Max. Paid media management is a service with a specific and checkable workload, which is why our paid advertising packages state what gets reviewed and how often rather than quoting an hours figure.
Common mistakes
- Planning around September 2026 for DSA. That date applied to broad match and ACA. DSA moved to February 2027.
- Assuming nothing has happened yet. If you ran campaign-level broad match or legacy ACA, your migration already occurred. Check before you plan.
- Trusting “mirrors your legacy setup.” Google preserves your settings. It does not preserve the behaviour those settings produced, because the matching engine underneath them changed.
- Turning text customization off to be safe. That also disables Final URL expansion and removes your access to URL exclusions. Safety through disabling features removes the controls along with the feature.
- Leaving compliance language in a pinned headline. Pins are not used when expansion selects a different URL.
- Judging the migration on two weeks of data. Matching changes need a full conversion cycle before the numbers mean anything, and most lead generation businesses have a cycle longer than two weeks.
- Measuring brand and non-brand together. Without the split you will read cannibalisation as improvement.
- Treating this as a Google Ads-only project. The campaign now targets off your website’s content. Website work is campaign work.
A worked example
The figures below are illustrative, not a client result. They show the shape of the problem rather than a promise about outcomes.
Take a Calgary trades business spending 4,000 CAD a month across one branded campaign and one Dynamic Search Ads campaign pointed at its services section. The site also contains a careers page, two city pages for a service area it no longer covers, and a 2024 blog post quoting a promotional price that has since risen.
Migrate that account without preparation and three things happen at once. Final URL expansion starts sending some service queries to the careers page and the retired city pages, because they are topically relevant even though they are commercially useless. Text customization reads the 2024 blog post and begins surfacing the old promotional price in generated descriptions. Keywordless matching pulls the services campaign onto the business’s own brand queries, so non-brand CPA appears to improve while total brand spend quietly doubles.
None of those three is an AI Max defect. Each one is a content inventory problem, a claims hygiene problem, and a measurement problem that the old keyword structure happened to hide. That is the honest frame for this migration: it does not create new weaknesses, it removes the structural shielding that was concealing the existing ones.
Frequently asked questions
When exactly does Google migrate Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max?
Automatic DSA migration runs from 1 to 28 February 2027, with reminder notices to affected advertisers on 15 January 2027. New DSA ad group creation is permanently removed at the same time. The original date was September 2026 and it was extended in an update dated 11 June 2026.
Can I opt out of the AI Max migration?
No. Google has published these as mandatory transitions with no exemption process. You can control how AI Max behaves through brand controls, URL inclusions and exclusions, locations of interest, page feeds and text guidelines, and you can choose when to migrate ahead of the deadline. You cannot choose to keep legacy Dynamic Search Ads past February 2027.
Do I have to delete my keywords?
No. AI Max operates inside existing Search campaigns and does not require removing keywords. Your keywords continue to work and continue to take priority where they match. AI Max adds matching on top rather than replacing what is there.
Will AI Max raise my cost per conversion?
Google reports average lifts in conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS: 14 percent typically, 27 percent for campaigns using mostly exact and phrase keywords, and 7 percent for DSA campaigns adopting the full feature suite over search term matching alone. Those are averages across all advertisers, not a forecast for your account. In practice CPA moves on configuration quality, the health of your conversion tracking and how clean your site content is, which is why the audit above matters more than the headline percentage.
Why do Google’s AI recommendations feel disconnected from my account goals?
Because the system optimises against the conversion signal in the account, and in most accounts that signal is broader than the business goal. If every form submission counts as a conversion, the system will find more form submissions, including the unqualified ones. Tighten the conversion definition first, then the recommendations start to look reasonable. This is the single highest-leverage fix available before migrating.
How do I stop AI Max sending traffic to the wrong pages?
Three options. Add campaign-level URL exclusions, which requires text customization to be enabled. Add ad-group-level URL inclusions to point expansion at a defined set of pages. Or supply a page feed with custom labels at ad group level and Final URL expansion disabled, which is the tightest control available.
Does AI Max work in Canada?
Yes. AI Max rolled out globally in beta from late May 2025 and the migration timeline applies to Canadian accounts the same way it applies elsewhere. The one Canada-specific consideration is advertising compliance: in regulated categories the obligation to get the claim right sits with the advertiser regardless of whether a human or a model wrote the headline.
What happens to my old DSA reporting history?
Google provides upgrade tools that port historical settings when you migrate a DSA campaign, and automigrated campaigns arrive configured to mirror the legacy setup including existing URL controls. Treat your pre-migration performance data as a baseline you need to export and keep, not as something that will stay conveniently comparable inside the interface.
The short version
February 2027 for Dynamic Search Ads. September 2026 already happened for campaign-level broad match and legacy Automatically Created Assets. The deadline is not the problem. The problem is that AI Max reads your website as targeting data and your website has pages, prices and claims on it that were never written to be advertised. Clean those up, build your exclusion lists, split brand from non-brand in your reporting, and run an experiment while the auction is still quiet.
Want this handled before January?
Wise Media runs the pre-migration audit above as a fixed piece of work: URL inventory and exclusion list, claims review across every advertised page, brand exclusion build, conversion tracking verification, and an AI Max experiment with a clean baseline on either side of it. If you would rather have it done than read about it, tell us about your account through our intake form and we will come back with a scoped quote in Canadian dollars.
Sources
- Google, Google’s Dynamic Search Ads are upgrading to AI Max, including the 11 June 2026 timeline update and the 7 percent full-feature-suite figure.
- Google, Unlock next-level performance with AI Max for Search campaigns, for the 14 percent and 27 percent figures and the original feature list.
- Google Ads Help, How AI Max for Search campaigns works, for the control levels and search terms reporting changes.
- Google Ads Help, About Final URL expansion in Search, for the text customization dependency, URL exclusions and pinned asset behaviour.
- Search Engine Land, Google sets AI Max migration timeline for Search campaigns, for the date-by-date breakdown of the developer timeline.
Dates and feature behaviour verified against the sources above on 3 October 2026. Google changes advertising product timelines without much notice, so confirm current dates in your own account notifications before committing a budget plan.