AI Max Auto-Upgrade: Your September Search Campaign Audit

September 2026 is the month the AI Max auto-upgrade starts running for real. If your Search campaigns use Automatically Created Assets, or the campaign-level broad match setting, Google is moving those campaigns to AI Max for Search on its own timeline this month, whether you touched anything or not. Dynamic Search Ads got a reprieve to February 2027, but ACA and broad match did not.

That is the piece the industry keeps mixing up. The DSA delay is real. The September ACA and broad match auto-upgrade is also real. Two clocks, two different deadlines. If you have been thinking of AI Max as a February 2027 problem, this article is the reset. The nearest deadline for most accounts is roughly three weeks out, not five months.

Here is the operator plan: what is switching this month, what Google is inheriting for you, and how to audit each account before the auto-upgrade window closes.

What the AI Max auto-upgrade actually does this September

Two categories of Search campaign are moving to AI Max in September 2026, per Google’s own announcement. First, any campaign that has Automatically Created Assets turned on. Second, any campaign that has the campaign-level broad match setting turned on. Both are being migrated to AI Max for Search behavior with a clear default: search term matching will be enabled, and for ACA campaigns, text customization will also be enabled.

Google has said the upgrades are expected to conclude by the end of September. That is a month-level window, not a calendar day, and the exact per-account timing lives inside the new API date fields Google shipped in Google Ads API v25.1 for this purpose. If you use API-managed campaign tools, those tools can read the exact migration timestamp per campaign.

The important detail is that this AI Max auto-upgrade is not opt-in. Google publishes it as an automatic transition. In-account notifications precede the upgrade, but no acceptance action is required, and no rollback is offered. Once your campaign migrates, it is on AI Max for Search, with search term matching and text customization on by default for the eligible campaign types.

What did not change: the Dynamic Search Ads timeline

Dynamic Search Ads had a separate original September 2026 sunset date. After advertiser feedback in mid-2026, Google pushed that DSA sunset back to February 2027 and reopened the ability to create new DSA campaigns in the meantime. As a detailed September 2 timeline breakdown from Improvado lays out, DSA campaign creation is currently allowed through January 2027, in-account notices begin in September 2026, reminder notifications hit January 15 2027, and the automatic DSA migration runs February 1 through 28 2027.

That is a five-month reprieve, and it is only for the DSA campaign type. It does not apply to ACA. It does not apply to campaign-level broad match. If any Search campaign in your account uses those two settings, you are on the September clock even if every other campaign is on the DSA clock.

Two clocks means two different account reviews. It also means the accounts most exposed to the September AI Max auto-upgrade are the ones that scaled through the ACA and broad match features to save time. Those are the same accounts that need a review this month.

Why the AI Max auto-upgrade matters for your Search performance

AI Max for Search is more than a rebrand. It combines your existing ad inputs, your website content, and richer real-time signals to match a wider set of queries. When the full feature suite runs, meaning search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion working together, Google says accounts see an average of 7 percent more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS compared to using search term matching alone.

The tradeoff is control. Text customization can rewrite headlines. Final URL expansion can route paid clicks to landing pages that were never meant to receive them. Search term matching casts a wider net on the queries your ads become eligible for. Those are the same tradeoffs you already navigated in the AI Max for Shopping playbook and the experimentation tools playbook. AI Max for Search doubles down on all three.

Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison, said in a July LinkedIn post that AI Max is now the default when you create a new Search campaign. Not a checkbox, the default. So even if none of your legacy campaigns had ACA or broad match turned on, anything spun up this month is already running AI Max behavior in the background. The auto-upgrade is one migration path. The default-on state on new campaigns is another.

The five-step AI Max auto-upgrade audit for your accounts

Block 30 minutes per account. Longer if the account has more than a dozen Search campaigns.

Step one: pull the list of Search campaigns in every account and flag every campaign where either Automatically Created Assets is on, or the campaign-level broad match setting is on. Those are your September auto-upgrade candidates. Anything not on the list is either DSA, moving on the February 2027 clock, or a standard Search campaign untouched by the September window.

Step two: audit landing page quality and conversion tracking on every flagged campaign. AI Max leans on final URL expansion and Smart Bidding signals more than legacy Search did. Thin landing pages, outdated content, or gaps in conversion tracking will show up as performance drift after migration. Same page-quality standards you already applied for local inventory ads apply here.

Step three: set text guidelines and brand controls before the upgrade lands. AI Max text customization can rewrite headlines. If you have brand voice constraints, regulated-language requirements, or landing page mismatches, text guidelines are how you tell the system what it can and cannot rewrite. This is a 20-minute protective move per account.

Step four: capture a pre-migration performance baseline. Export the search terms report, conversion volume, CPA, ROAS, and landing page report for each flagged campaign for the trailing 90 days. Do it before the auto-upgrade fires. If AI Max shifts your performance, you need a clean historical reference to compare against.

Step five: watch the first two weeks after each campaign migrates. Pull a daily performance report by campaign. Look for shifts in impression share, average CPC, share of new query patterns that were never eligible before, and landing page distribution. That is where AI Max will reshape delivery first. A big shift is not automatically bad, but it needs a decision, not a shrug.

One extra check worth building into the AI Max auto-upgrade process: pull the search terms report weekly for the first month. AI Max’s search term matching is the setting most likely to pull in queries your legacy setup would not have touched. If those new queries convert, you learn something. If they burn budget on off-topic clicks, you know exactly where to tighten your negatives and your text guidelines. Either way, the search terms report is where you see the change before it shows up on your CPA line.

How the AI Max auto-upgrade fits your September operating cadence

September has already stacked up. The local services ads migration is running its 14-day countdown emails. The Shopping policies consolidation lands this month. The Google Ads language targeting change is due late September. And now the ACA and broad match auto-upgrade to AI Max joins the same window.

Group the audits. One 30 to 45-minute block per client account, one report at the end. Cover ACA and broad match exposure, landing page and conversion tracking hygiene, text guidelines, language settings, Shopping policy documentation, and local services migration status in the same session. That is the difference between an agency that scales through a busy Google month and one that ends October catching up on migrations that happened without a plan.

The DSA delay does not save you here. February 2027 is a real deadline, but September is a real one too, and the September deadline is the closer one for most accounts. Use the ACA and broad match auto-upgrade as the forcing function to schedule the September review this week, before the migration window starts firing in your accounts. Every one of the September changes is Google reorganizing the same product surface for AI-driven delivery. The accounts that batch the reviews get one clean update note at the end of the month. The accounts that do not spend October catching up on migrations they missed.

If you want a second set of eyes on which of your Search campaigns fall inside the September window, or you want help setting text guidelines before the upgrade lands, book a free consultation and we will walk through the audit together. Let’s Grow!