Last updated: February 10, 2026
The Performance Max versus Search debate has been running for four years now, and 2026 is the first year where the answer genuinely depends on a set of variables that did not exist twelve months ago. The introduction of AI Max for Search, the massive transparency improvements to Performance Max throughout 2025, and the continued blurring of campaign type boundaries have fundamentally changed the calculus. What used to be a binary choice between control and automation is now a three-way strategic decision that requires understanding not just what each campaign type does, but how they interact with each other and with Google's increasingly aggressive AI.
If you are still running the same PMax-versus-Search structure you had in 2024, you are almost certainly leaving performance on the table. The rules have changed. The features have changed. The way Google's algorithm prioritizes between campaign types has changed. And the introduction of AI Max as a middle ground between the two has created both new opportunities and new complications.
This article breaks down exactly where things stand in February 2026, what changed in 2025 that you need to account for, when to use Performance Max, when to use Search, when to use both, and how the interplay between these campaign types should actually be managed for maximum results.
Before diving into the 2026-specific analysis, let us make sure we are on the same page about what each campaign type is and is not.
Search campaigns show text ads on Google's Search results pages and search partner sites. You choose keywords, write ad copy, set bids, and control where your ads appear at a granular level. In 2026, Search campaigns also support AI Max as an optional enhancement layer that expands keyword matching, generates dynamic ad copy, and selects landing pages using AI.
Search campaigns give you the most control of any Google Ads campaign type. You can see exactly which queries trigger your ads, manage keywords at the ad group level, write specific ad copy for specific audiences, and adjust bids for individual keywords. The trade-off is that Search campaigns only serve ads on search inventory. No Display. No YouTube. No Gmail. No Discover. No Maps.
Performance Max serves ads across every Google channel from a single campaign: Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps, and (as of late 2025) Waze. You provide assets (images, videos, headlines, descriptions, logos), audience signals, and conversion goals. Google's AI handles everything else: bidding, targeting, creative assembly, channel allocation, and budget distribution.
The trade-off has always been transparency and control. You cannot choose which channels receive your budget. You cannot write different ad copy for Search versus Display. You cannot see exactly which keywords triggered your search ads (though this improved significantly in 2025). Performance Max is designed to maximize total conversions across all of Google's properties, which sometimes means it does things you would not choose to do manually.
AI Max for Search, announced at Google Marketing Live in May 2025 and rolled out globally through Q3 2025, is not a new campaign type. It is an optional enhancement layer that you enable on existing Search campaigns. When activated, AI Max applies artificial intelligence to three elements of your Search campaigns: search term matching (expanding beyond your keywords to find relevant queries), ad copy creation (dynamically generating headlines and descriptions using Google's Gemini model), and landing page selection (choosing the most relevant page from your site for each query).
Think of AI Max as giving your Search campaigns some of Performance Max's intelligence while keeping the transparency and control of Search. You still see full search terms reports. You still manage keywords. You still write base ad copy. But AI Max layer expands your reach beyond what keywords alone would capture.
The 2025 updates to both Performance Max and Search campaigns were the most significant since PMax launched in 2021. Understanding these changes is essential to making the right campaign structure decisions in 2026.
The single biggest criticism of Performance Max from 2021 through 2024 was opacity. You could not see where your budget went. You could not see which search queries triggered your ads. You could not meaningfully control which channels received spend. 2025 addressed most of these complaints directly.
Channel performance reporting rolled out to all PMax campaigns in November 2025. For the first time, advertisers can see exactly how their budget is distributed across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps, and (soon) search partners. You can see clicks, conversions, conversion value, and cost broken down by individual channel. This was the most requested PMax feature since launch and fundamentally changes how advertisers can evaluate and optimize their automated campaigns.
Search term reporting became available for PMax's Search and Shopping placements. While not as comprehensive as Search campaign search terms reports, this gives advertisers actual visibility into which queries are triggering PMax search ads. Combined with the negative keyword expansion, this transforms PMax from a complete black box into something approaching a tinted window.
Campaign-level negative keywords went from 100 to 10,000 per campaign in March 2025. Shared negative keyword lists for PMax followed in August 2025. This 100x increase in negative keyword capacity addressed the most practical complaint about PMax control. Advertisers can now block thousands of irrelevant queries from their PMax search and shopping inventory.
Search themes doubled from 25 to 50 per asset group in May 2025. Search themes guide PMax's AI toward specific query categories, and the expanded limit gives advertisers more influence over which searches trigger their PMax ads.
Asset-level reporting now shows impressions, clicks, and cost data for individual assets, letting advertisers see which creative elements actually perform rather than relying on Google's vague "Best," "Good," and "Low" ratings.
Waze inventory was added to PMax for store goals campaigns in the US in November 2025, with international expansion planned for 2026. Businesses appear as "Promoted Places in Navigation" pins on Waze maps, adding another channel to PMax's already broad reach.
The launch of AI Max for Search was the defining Search campaign update of 2025. But it was not the only one.
AI Max's expanded matching uses your existing keywords, landing pages, and ad assets to find queries your keyword list would never have captured. Google reports a 14% average conversion improvement and up to 27% lift for accounts that relied heavily on exact match keywords. However, independent testing tells a more complex story: approximately 84% of advertisers report neutral or negative results from AI Max. The disparity likely comes down to account readiness (strong conversion tracking, adequate negative keywords, quality landing pages) and the strategic context of the campaign.
Dynamic Search Ads are being phased toward obsolescence. AI Max essentially subsumes the functionality of DSA while adding more features. Google has not officially announced DSA deprecation, but the overlap between DSA, AI Max, and PMax's keywordless search matching makes it increasingly redundant. Industry experts predict a formal deprecation announcement in 2026 with a 12-18 month migration period.
Search ads in AI Overviews expanded from mobile-only US availability to desktop and multiple global markets. Your search ads can now appear directly within AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, a placement that did not exist a year ago. Advertisers cannot yet bid specifically for AI Overview placements, but the inventory is served through existing Search campaigns.
One of the most important but least discussed changes involves how Google prioritizes between campaign types when multiple campaigns could serve the same query. The general hierarchy works like this: if a Search campaign has an exact match keyword that matches the query, Search takes priority over PMax. If only broad match or phrase match keywords exist, PMax may serve instead if Google's AI predicts it will drive better results. AI Max complicates this further by expanding what Search campaigns can match, creating more overlap with PMax.
In practice, this means that advertisers running both PMax and Search campaigns need to be more deliberate about how they structure their keywords and search themes to avoid cannibalization. This is a more nuanced problem in 2026 than it was in 2024 when the boundaries between campaign types were clearer.
Even with the 2025 transparency improvements, Performance Max remains a fundamentally different approach to Google Ads than Search campaigns. Understanding when that approach works and when it does not is the core strategic question.
Ecommerce with large product catalogs. PMax was designed for this use case, and it shows. Shopping feed integration, cross-channel product promotion, and automated audience discovery make PMax the strongest campaign type for retailers with 50 or more products. The AI's ability to identify which products to show which users across Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Display simultaneously is genuinely difficult to replicate with manual campaign management. Ecommerce accounts running well-optimized PMax campaigns consistently report conversion rates between 5% and 7% with lower CPAs than equivalent manual Shopping plus Search structures.
Cross-channel reach and brand awareness. No other single campaign type serves ads across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, Maps, and Waze simultaneously. For businesses that need broad reach across the Google ecosystem, PMax eliminates the complexity of managing six or seven separate campaign types. One campaign, one budget, one set of conversion goals.
Businesses with limited PPC resources. If you do not have a dedicated PPC specialist (or the budget for one), PMax's automation handles the complex decisions that would otherwise require expertise. The trade-off in control is offset by the reduction in required management time and knowledge. Small businesses without advertising expertise consistently see better results from PMax than from poorly managed Search campaigns.
Remarketing and audience expansion. PMax's ability to target users across channels based on audience signals, customer lists, and behavioral data makes it powerful for remarketing and lookalike audience expansion. When you upload a customer match list, PMax can find similar users across every Google property and serve them relevant ads, something that would require multiple separate campaigns with traditional campaign types.
Lead generation quality. This is PMax's most persistent weakness. For lead generation businesses (B2B, services, professional firms), PMax consistently generates higher volume but lower quality leads compared to well-managed Search campaigns. The algorithm optimizes for conversion volume, and if your conversion action is a form submission, PMax will find every low-intent form filler across its channels. Multiple studies and advertiser reports from 2025 confirm that PMax lead quality remains 20-40% lower than Search for most B2B and service businesses.
Complex or long sales cycles. B2B software buyers, enterprise service purchasers, and anyone with a multi-stage research process before conversion tend to respond better to targeted Search ads that address their specific pain points than to PMax's automated creative. These buyers search specific technical terms, compare detailed feature sets, and need messaging that speaks to their exact use case. PMax's generalized creative assembly struggles with this level of specificity.
Tight budget control. Despite the transparency improvements, you still cannot directly control how PMax allocates your budget across channels. Channel reporting tells you where budget went after the fact, but you cannot say "spend 60% on Search and 20% on YouTube." You can influence allocation through asset composition (more video assets shift budget toward YouTube, more text assets shift toward Search), but you cannot mandate it. For advertisers with strict channel-level budget requirements, this remains a dealbreaker.
Brand-sensitive industries. PMax's automated creative assembly means your headlines, descriptions, and images get combined in ways you may not have chosen. For regulated industries (healthcare, finance, legal) where specific messaging requirements apply, the lack of creative control creates compliance risk. You can pin certain assets, but the AI still has significant latitude in how it assembles the final ad.
Transparency on non-search channels. While search term reporting and negative keywords addressed the transparency problem for PMax's Search and Shopping inventory, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover placements remain largely opaque. You can see channel-level performance, but you cannot see exactly which placements, audiences, or creatives drove specific results on non-search channels. For advertisers who need granular placement-level control, this is still insufficient.
Search campaigns in 2026 are significantly more powerful than they were a year ago, primarily because of AI Max. But they also carry new risks that advertisers need to understand.
High-intent keyword targeting. Search campaigns remain the best way to capture demand from users actively searching for your product or service. When someone types "emergency plumber near me" or "best CRM for small business," they are expressing clear purchase intent. Matching that intent with a specific keyword, specific ad copy addressing their exact need, and a specific landing page with relevant content produces conversion rates that no other campaign type can match.
B2B and professional services. Every piece of data from 2024 and 2025 confirms that Search campaigns significantly outperform PMax for B2B lead generation quality. B2B buyers use specific, technical search terms that require equally specific ad copy. A CFO searching for "enterprise financial planning software SOC 2 compliant" needs an ad that addresses SOC 2 compliance directly, not a generic Performance Max ad assembled from broad headlines about financial planning software.
Precise messaging control. Search campaigns give you complete control over which ad copy serves for which keywords. You can write different ads for different stages of the buying journey, different audience segments, different products, and different competitive contexts. This precision matters enormously for businesses where messaging nuance drives conversion.
Granular performance data. Full search terms reports, keyword-level quality scores, ad-level performance metrics, and detailed auction insights give you everything you need to understand exactly what is working and what is not. This data enables the kind of iterative optimization that drives long-term performance improvements.
Budget precision. You can set budgets at the campaign level, control bids at the keyword level, use bid adjustments for devices, locations, and time of day, and know exactly where every dollar goes. For advertisers managing to strict ROI targets, this level of control is essential.
Limited reach. Search campaigns only serve on Google Search and search partners. No Display. No YouTube. No Gmail. No Discover. No Maps. If your customers spend time on YouTube, browse Gmail, or use Google Maps, Search campaigns cannot reach them in those environments.
Manual management burden. Well-optimized Search campaigns require constant attention: keyword research, bid management, ad copy testing, negative keyword updates, quality score optimization, and structural adjustments. The time investment is significant, and performance degrades quickly when management lapses.
Diminishing keyword control. Even without AI Max, Search campaigns in 2026 match queries more broadly than ever before. Exact match includes "same meaning" variations. Phrase match is wider than it was two years ago. AI Max expands matching further still. The level of keyword precision that Search campaigns offered in 2019 simply does not exist anymore. You can still manage keywords, but they are more like intent signals than exact match triggers.
Scale limitations. There is a natural ceiling on how many relevant search queries exist for your products or services. Once you have captured the highest-intent keywords, scaling a Search campaign means moving into progressively broader match types and lower-intent queries, which reduces efficiency. PMax's cross-channel approach can scale beyond the search inventory ceiling.
AI Max for Search is the most consequential addition to Search campaigns since responsive search ads replaced expanded text ads. It expands what Search campaigns can do, but it also introduces new risks.
The benefits are real. AI Max finds relevant queries that your keyword list misses. It dynamically adjusts ad copy to match user intent. It selects optimal landing pages from your site. For advertisers with strong conversion tracking, comprehensive negative keyword lists, and quality landing pages, these capabilities genuinely improve performance. Google's reported 14% average conversion improvement is plausible for well-prepared accounts.
But the risks are equally real. AI Max expands matching aggressively, which means it can serve your ads for queries you never intended to target. Without robust negative keyword lists, this expanded matching turns into expanded waste. The 84% of advertisers reporting neutral or negative results likely includes many who enabled AI Max without adequate negative keywords, conversion tracking, or landing page depth.
The smart approach in 2026 is to test AI Max using Google's experiment framework (50/50 traffic split) rather than enabling it across your entire account. Monitor search terms reports closely during the test period. Build out negative keyword lists before enabling, not after. And recognize that AI Max changes the nature of your Search campaigns from precise keyword targeting to AI-assisted intent matching, which is a meaningful shift in how you manage the campaigns.
Rather than declaring one campaign type universally better than the other, here is a practical framework for deciding what to use based on your specific situation.
You are in ecommerce with a strong product feed and 50+ SKUs. Your product imagery and video assets are high quality. You have adequate conversion data (at least 30 conversions per month per campaign, ideally more). You want broad reach across all Google channels without managing multiple campaign types. Your conversion actions accurately represent business value (not just form fills). You have the negative keyword infrastructure to control Search and Shopping query quality.
You are in B2B, professional services, or lead generation where lead quality matters more than volume. Your customers search specific, technical terms that require targeted messaging. You need granular control over ad copy, keywords, and bid strategy. Your budget is tight and you need to know exactly where every dollar goes. You operate in a regulated industry where messaging compliance is critical. You have the expertise (or the team) to manage campaigns actively.
Running both PMax and Search together, with deliberate structure to minimize cannibalization, is the recommended approach for the majority of advertisers in 2026. Google itself now promotes a "Power Pack" strategy: Performance Max for broad, multi-channel reach; AI Max-enabled Search for high-intent search coverage; and Demand Gen for awareness and consideration.
The practical structure looks like this. Search campaigns capture your highest-intent, highest-value keywords with exact and phrase match. These are the queries where you need specific messaging and cannot afford to let PMax's automated creative represent your brand. PMax captures everything else: the broader search queries, shopping inventory, display, video, and discovery channels. PMax's audience signals and search themes guide the AI toward the right traffic, while negative keywords prevent it from cannibalizing your Search campaigns' core terms.
Budget allocation guidelines by business type:
For ecommerce businesses, allocate 60-70% to Performance Max and 30-40% to Search. PMax handles the product feed, Shopping inventory, and cross-channel promotion that ecommerce depends on. Search campaigns focus on branded terms, high-margin product categories, and competitor conquesting where messaging precision matters.
For B2B and lead generation, flip the allocation: 60-70% to Search and 30-40% to Performance Max. Search captures the high-intent, specific queries that generate quality leads. PMax provides incremental reach and brand awareness across channels where your buyers spend time outside of search.
For local services, a roughly even split (50/50) works well. Search captures the "plumber near me" and "emergency electrician" queries that represent immediate need. PMax extends reach to Maps, Display remarketing, and YouTube, where local service discovery increasingly happens.
The biggest practical risk of running PMax and Search together is cannibalization, where PMax serves ads for queries that your Search campaigns should be handling. When this happens, you lose the messaging precision, keyword-level data, and conversion rate advantage that Search campaigns provide, while PMax takes credit for conversions it arguably stole from Search.
Google's system generally gives priority to Search campaigns when an exact match keyword exists for the user's query. But when the match is broad or phrase, PMax may serve instead if Google predicts better performance. AI Max further complicates this by expanding what Search campaigns match, creating more overlap with PMax's search inventory.
The symptoms of cannibalization include declining Search campaign impression share even though budgets have not changed, PMax showing increased search conversions while total account conversions remain flat, and Search campaign CPAs rising as PMax takes the easier conversions.
First, use your highest-value keywords as exact match in Search campaigns to establish priority. Google generally respects exact match priority over PMax for the same query.
Second, add your core Search keywords as negative keywords in Performance Max to explicitly block PMax from competing for those queries. This is now practical with the 10,000 negative keyword limit.
Third, monitor the search terms reports in both campaign types to identify overlap. If the same queries appear in both PMax and Search search terms, you have a cannibalization problem that needs structural adjustment.
Fourth, use search themes in PMax strategically to guide it toward queries that your Search campaigns do not cover, rather than toward queries where your Search campaigns are already strong.
Fifth, review channel reporting in PMax to understand how much of your PMax budget goes to Search versus other channels. If PMax is spending heavily on Search inventory, that is likely overlap territory.
The framework above is sound. The problem is executing it consistently. Managing the interplay between Performance Max and Search campaigns requires constant vigilance: daily monitoring of search terms across multiple campaign types, weekly analysis of cannibalization patterns, ongoing negative keyword updates as new queries emerge, budget rebalancing as performance shifts, and creative refreshes as assets fatigue.
Most advertisers, whether managing their own accounts or working with agencies, do not have the capacity to do this at the frequency required. The typical agency reviews accounts weekly or biweekly. The typical in-house marketer reviews monthly. Between reviews, the algorithms are continuously evolving their behavior. PMax shifts budget between channels. AI Max finds new query patterns. Search terms reports fill with new data. Every day without optimization is a day where the campaign structure drifts further from optimal.
This is the specific problem that groas was designed to solve. groas manages the entire campaign structure autonomously, including the interplay between PMax and Search, the negative keyword lists that prevent cannibalization, the budget allocation between campaign types, the bid adjustments within each campaign, and the ad copy testing that keeps creative fresh.
Because groas operates continuously (not weekly or monthly), it catches cannibalization patterns within hours rather than weeks. When PMax starts encroaching on Search territory, groas adds the appropriate negative keywords immediately. When a Search campaign's impression share drops because of PMax overlap, groas adjusts the structure before the impact compounds. When AI Max expands matching into irrelevant territory, groas blocks the waste before it accumulates.
The twelve optimization levers that groas manages simultaneously (bidding, keywords, negatives, ad copy, landing pages, budget allocation, campaign structure, audience targeting, search themes, creative testing, conversion tracking configuration, and device/location/schedule adjustments) are deeply interdependent. A change in negative keywords affects bidding strategy. A shift in budget allocation affects keyword priority. A new ad copy variant affects quality score, which affects CPC, which affects budget allocation. No human team can optimize all twelve levers simultaneously in real time. groas can, because that is literally what it was built to do.
The result is that groas clients running both PMax and Search together see significantly better results than those managing the same structure manually, not because the strategy is different, but because the execution is continuous rather than periodic.
Here is what the aggregate performance data tells us about how these campaign types compare across business types, based on data from across the industry throughout 2025.
Performance Max consistently outperforms Search-only setups for ecommerce when the product feed is well-optimized and visual assets are strong. Average conversion rates for PMax ecommerce campaigns sit around 5.5-6.5%, compared to 4.5-5.5% for Search-only (Shopping plus text ads). CPA tends to be 15-25% lower in PMax because the AI finds efficient paths through Shopping and Display remarketing that Search alone cannot access.
However, the strongest ecommerce results come from running both: PMax handles the product feed and cross-channel promotion, while Search campaigns capture branded terms and high-margin category-specific queries. Combined structures typically outperform PMax-only by 10-20% on total ROAS.
Search campaigns dominate for lead quality. PMax generates 30-50% more lead volume for most B2B advertisers, but lead-to-customer conversion rates are 20-40% lower. When measured on cost per qualified lead (not just cost per form fill), Search campaigns outperform PMax by 25-45% across most industries.
The exception is top-of-funnel brand awareness. PMax's Display and YouTube inventory can drive awareness that feeds future Search conversions. Advertisers who track the full funnel (not just last-click) sometimes find that PMax contributes more value than lead-level metrics suggest.
The picture here has shifted significantly since PMax added Waze inventory and improved Maps presence. Local service businesses running PMax with store goals see meaningful incremental foot traffic and calls from Display, Maps, and now Waze that Search campaigns simply cannot access. The recommendation for local services in 2026 is firmly "both," with Search capturing explicit service queries and PMax extending reach to local discovery channels.
Based on Google's strategic direction and the pattern of updates through 2025, here is what is likely coming for both campaign types.
Google will push AI Max adoption more aggressively, potentially making it the default setting for new Search campaigns. Dynamic Search Ads may receive a formal deprecation announcement with a 12-18 month migration timeline. PMax will likely gain more granular channel allocation controls, though full manual control is unlikely. AI Overviews ad placements will expand, and advertisers may get separate bidding controls for this inventory. Performance Max reporting will continue to improve, with more detailed placement-level data for non-search channels.
The direction is clear: Google is moving toward more AI-driven campaign management across all campaign types. The distinction between PMax and Search is narrowing, not widening. The advertisers who thrive in this environment are those who learn to guide AI effectively (through search themes, negative keywords, audience signals, and quality creative) rather than those who try to maintain manual control over every detail.
The critical skills are shifting from keyword management and bid optimization to signal architecture, creative strategy, and conversion tracking infrastructure. The campaign manager's role is becoming more about telling the AI what "good" looks like and less about pulling individual levers.
For businesses that want to stay ahead of this shift without becoming full-time Google Ads strategists, autonomous AI platforms like groas represent the natural evolution. Instead of hiring a human to manage the AI that manages your ads, you let AI manage the AI, with the strategic sophistication, continuous attention, and real-time responsiveness that no human team can match at scale.
For most businesses, the answer is both. Search campaigns capture high-intent queries with precise messaging control, while PMax extends reach across Google's full channel network. The optimal budget split depends on your business type: ecommerce should lean 60-70% toward PMax, B2B and lead generation should lean 60-70% toward Search, and local services work best with a roughly even split. Running only one campaign type means leaving either control or reach on the table.
AI Max for Search is an optional enhancement layer for existing Search campaigns that uses AI to expand keyword matching, generate dynamic ad copy, and select landing pages. It gives Search campaigns some of PMax's intelligence while maintaining Search's transparency and control. AI Max narrows the capability gap between the two campaign types, making Search more competitive for broader reach while retaining its granular data advantages. Google reports a 14% average conversion improvement, though independent testing shows mixed results depending on account readiness.
Yes, this can happen and is called cannibalization. When PMax serves ads for queries that your Search campaigns should be handling, you lose messaging precision and keyword-level data while PMax takes credit for conversions your Search ads would have captured. To prevent this, use exact match keywords in Search to establish priority, add your core Search keywords as negatives in PMax, and monitor search terms reports in both campaign types for overlap.
The five most impactful PMax changes in 2025 were: negative keywords expanding from 100 to 10,000 per campaign (March), search term reporting for Search and Shopping inventory, channel performance reporting showing where budget goes across all channels (November), search themes doubling from 25 to 50 per asset group (May), and shared negative keyword list support for PMax (August). Waze inventory for store goals campaigns was also added in November. Together, these updates transformed PMax from a near-complete black box into a campaign type with meaningful transparency and control.
Generally yes, especially for retailers with large product catalogs (50+ SKUs) and strong visual assets. PMax's Shopping feed integration, cross-channel product promotion, and automated audience discovery are specifically designed for ecommerce use cases. However, the best ecommerce results come from running PMax alongside Search campaigns that handle branded queries and high-margin category terms. PMax alone leaves money on the table by not capturing the highest-intent search queries with optimized messaging.
Not directly. You cannot tell PMax to allocate a specific percentage to Search versus YouTube versus Display. However, you can influence allocation through your asset composition (providing more video shifts budget toward YouTube, providing strong text assets shifts budget toward Search), search themes, negative keywords, and audience signals. Channel performance reporting now lets you see where budget went after the fact, which enables informed strategic adjustments even if direct control is not available.
Google now recommends a "Power Pack" campaign structure for 2026 that combines three campaign types: Performance Max for broad, multi-channel reach; AI Max-enabled Search campaigns for high-intent search coverage with transparency; and Demand Gen campaigns for awareness and consideration. Budget allocation varies by business type, but the principle is that each campaign type handles a different stage and channel of the customer journey, with minimal overlap when structured correctly.
Test it before committing. Use Google's experiment framework to run a 50/50 traffic split between an AI Max-enabled version and your standard Search campaign. Monitor search terms reports closely during the test to catch expanded matching that hits irrelevant queries. Ensure your negative keyword lists are comprehensive before enabling AI Max, as the expanded matching will surface new query patterns, both good and bad. If your test shows improved conversions without significant quality degradation, scale it. If results are neutral or negative, keep standard Search and revisit in a few months as Google refines the feature.
groas manages both campaign types autonomously, continuously monitoring the interplay between them to prevent cannibalization and maximize total account performance. This includes adding negative keywords in real time when PMax encroaches on Search territory, rebalancing budgets between campaign types as performance data shifts, adjusting search themes and audience signals to minimize overlap, and optimizing all twelve levers (bidding, keywords, negatives, ad copy, budget allocation, campaign structure, and more) simultaneously across both campaign types. Because groas operates 24/7 rather than on a weekly or monthly review schedule, it catches and resolves structural issues before they compound into meaningful waste.
Possibly, but not imminently. Google's trajectory suggests gradual convergence: Search campaigns are getting more automated through AI Max, while PMax is getting more transparent through reporting improvements. The overlap between them is growing. Dynamic Search Ads are likely to be deprecated in 2026, and the long-term direction points toward a single AI-driven campaign type with varying levels of advertiser control. But full merger is probably 2-3 years away at minimum, and Google has a track record of extending migration timelines. For now, the strategic play is optimizing both campaign types together rather than betting on which one survives.
