Google Is Replacing Dynamic Search Ads With AI Max: What Every Advertiser Needs to Know Before September

If you run Google Search campaigns — for your own business or for clients — something significant just landed on your radar. On 15 April 2026, Google confirmed that Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are being retired and will automatically upgrade to AI Max for Search starting in September. It's not a minor setting change. It's a fundamental shift in how Google's Search product handles query matching, ad copy generation, and landing page selection — and the clock is already ticking.

For Australian advertisers managing e-commerce brands, lead gen campaigns, or service-based businesses through Google Ads, this change will touch your account whether you act on it or not. The question is whether you manage the transition on your terms or let Google auto-migrate for you. Spoiler: you want to be in control of this one.

This article breaks down exactly what AI Max is, what's changing, what the timeline looks like, and — most importantly — what you should be doing right now to prepare your campaigns for a smooth transition.

What Were Dynamic Search Ads, and Why Is Google Retiring Them?

Dynamic Search Ads have been a staple of Google Ads accounts since 2011. The premise was elegant in its simplicity: instead of building out exhaustive keyword lists, you'd point Google at your website (or a data feed), set a bid, and let Google's crawl of your pages determine which search queries your ads would enter. Google would auto-generate a headline from your page content, and you'd control the description lines. For e-commerce brands with large catalogues or service businesses with a deep range of offerings, DSAs were a genuinely useful way to capture long-tail demand without manually building out thousands of ad groups.

But DSA was built in a pre-AI era. Its crawl-and-match logic has aged, and the headlines it generates have always been rough around the edges. Google has been steadily moving its Search product toward AI-driven matching — first with broad match improvements, then with Automatically Created Assets (ACA), and now with AI Max. DSA, Automatically Created Assets at the campaign level, and campaign-level broad match settings are all being consolidated into this new AI Max framework. The retirement makes sense from Google's product roadmap perspective, but it creates real transition risk for advertisers who aren't paying attention.

What Is AI Max for Search Campaigns?

AI Max for Search is Google's next-generation campaign feature set that combines three previously separate capabilities into a unified AI-driven layer: search term matching, text customisation, and final URL expansion. Think of it as Google taking its best understanding of your business — your ad copy, your landing pages, your historical performance data — and using that to identify search queries that your keywords alone might miss, while dynamically adapting your ad text and destination URL to suit the specific query.

Here's how each component works in practice:

• Search term matching expands your reach beyond your exact keyword list to include semantically related queries with high conversion intent. It goes further than standard broad match by incorporating signals from your landing pages and ad content — not just keyword inference.
• Text customisation dynamically adapts headlines and descriptions to be more relevant to specific queries. Rather than showing the same RSA to every user, AI Max can tailor the copy to better reflect what the searcher is looking for — within the guardrails of your existing ad assets.
• Final URL expansion can redirect users to the most relevant page on your site for a given query, rather than always sending them to the URL you specified in your ad. For a retailer, this might mean a search for "men's trail running shoes" gets served a specific product page rather than a general category page.

Google's own data claims that advertisers using the full AI Max feature suite — all three components active — see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS compared to using search term matching alone. That's a meaningful number if it holds true across account types, though as always, the results will vary significantly depending on how well your account is structured and how strong your conversion tracking is.

The Timeline: What's Happening and When

Google has been careful to give advertisers a runway here, but it's not a long one. Here's the sequence of events as confirmed:

• Mid-April 2026 (now): Google has started rolling out upgrade tools for existing DSA users. These tools allow you to manually migrate your DSA campaigns into standard ad groups within an AI Max framework, carrying over historical settings, audiences, and structure where possible.
• September 2026: Any remaining campaigns still using DSA, campaign-level automatically created assets, or campaign-level broad match will be automatically upgraded to AI Max by Google. You will no longer be able to create new DSA campaigns via Google Ads, Google Ads Editor, or the Google Ads API after this date.

What this means practically: you have approximately four months to conduct a proactive migration on your own terms, or Google will do it for you. A Google-automated migration is not necessarily wrong, but it won't account for the nuances of your account — your negative keyword lists, your audience exclusions, your bidding strategy preferences, or the specific pages you want to prioritise. Doing it manually gives you the chance to restructure, tighten, and optimise as you go.

What You Should Be Doing Right Now

The four months between now and September is enough time to do this properly, but only if you start soon. Here's a practical approach to the migration:

1. Audit Your Current DSA Campaigns

Before you migrate anything, understand what you have. Pull a search terms report for your DSA campaigns over the last 90 days and identify which queries are actually converting. These become the foundation of your standard keyword ad groups once you transition — don't let that historical data disappear into an automated migration without capturing it first. Also note your top-performing dynamic ad targets (specific pages or page categories), because these will inform how you structure new standard ad groups.

2. Review and Expand Your Negative Keyword Lists

AI Max's broader query matching is powerful, but it can serve your ads for queries that are irrelevant or damaging to your brand if your negative keyword lists aren't airtight. Take this opportunity to thoroughly review your negatives at both the campaign and account level. Look at the search terms your DSA campaigns have been triggering and identify any patterns of wasted spend that you'll want to exclude from day one in your AI Max setup.

3. Strengthen Your Ad Assets Before Migration

AI Max's text customisation pulls from your existing RSA assets to dynamically assemble ad copy. The richer and more varied your asset library, the better the system performs. If your current ad groups only have the minimum three headlines and two descriptions, now is the time to add more. Aim for the full 15 headlines and 4 descriptions per RSA, with a wide variety of messaging angles — product benefits, urgency, social proof, USPs. This gives the AI more material to work with when tailoring copy to individual queries.

4. Decide Your Stance on Final URL Expansion

Final URL expansion is arguably the most consequential AI Max feature for e-commerce and lead gen advertisers. Used well, it improves landing page relevance and conversion rates. Used carelessly, it sends traffic to under-optimised pages — or worse, pages with no conversion tracking. Before you enable it, walk through your site and ensure that your key destination pages have proper GTM or GA4 event tracking in place, and that your conversion actions are firing correctly. If you're not confident in your tracking coverage, turn URL expansion off initially and layer it in once you've confirmed data integrity.

The Bigger Picture: Google's Direction of Travel

The DSA-to-AI Max migration isn't happening in isolation. It's part of a broader, unmistakable trend in Google Ads: the platform is systematically replacing manually-controlled, rule-based features with AI-driven automation. We've seen it with smart bidding replacing manual CPC, Performance Max absorbing Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, and now AI Max subsuming DSA and Automatically Created Assets.

For advertisers, this trajectory has clear implications. The advertiser's role is shifting away from granular control of individual keywords, match types, and bid adjustments, and toward quality of inputs: the richness of your creative assets, the accuracy of your conversion tracking, the clarity of your business goals fed into the platform. Accounts that invest in strong creative libraries, flawless GA4/GTM implementation, and well-structured audience signals will be rewarded by AI Max and Performance Max alike. Accounts that rely on legacy structures and manual overrides will find themselves fighting the algorithm — and losing.

The good news for advertisers willing to lean into this shift is that AI Max's early performance numbers are genuinely encouraging. The 7% lift in conversions at comparable efficiency is a credible outcome for accounts with good data quality. And unlike DSA, AI Max gives you meaningful controls — audience targeting layers, URL expansion exclusions, brand exclusions, and campaign-level settings — so you're not handing over the keys completely.

Key Takeaways for Australian Advertisers

To summarise what you need to take away from this announcement:

• DSA campaigns will stop being available after September 2026 — don't wait to be auto-migrated.
• Use the upgrade tools now available in Google Ads to migrate proactively and preserve your historical data.
• Expand your RSA asset libraries, tighten your negative keyword lists, and audit your conversion tracking before migration.
• Approach final URL expansion carefully — understand which pages on your site are ready to receive paid traffic before enabling it.
• This is part of a broader platform shift toward AI automation; building strong inputs (creative, tracking, audiences) is the most durable competitive advantage going forward.

The September deadline sounds distant, but Google Ads migrations take time when done properly. Proactive advertisers who start now will have weeks of live data from their migrated campaigns before the forced cutover — giving them time to learn, adjust, and optimise before the transition is no longer optional.

Staying ahead of platform changes like this is a full-time job. If you'd like a team who lives and breathes Google Ads strategy and can manage this transition for your brand or your clients, get in touch with NovaReach.