Google Delayed the DSA to AI Max Migration: Your 90-Day Operator Plan

If you have been putting off the Dynamic Search Ads conversation with your team, you just bought yourself five more months. On June 11, 2026, Google quietly extended the DSA-to-AI Max automigration deadline from September 2026 to February 2027. The company also restored the ability to create brand-new DSA campaigns starting June 15, after curtailing creation in earlier deprecation steps.

That second change is the one most agencies missed. For the last several weeks, you could keep existing DSA campaigns running but could not spin up a new one. On Monday, June 15, that restriction lifts again. Then the door closes for good in January 2027, with full automigration following in February.

This is not a reprieve. This is a runway. The point of the DSA to AI Max extension is to let advertisers run their own controlled migrations on their own clock, instead of being shoved through the door by a calendar deadline that lands inside the holiday quarter.

What Actually Changed in the DSA to AI Max Timeline

Google’s June 11 update on the Google Ads Developer Blog laid out the new four-phase schedule in unusually clear language. The previous September 2026 deadline is gone. The new dates are these.

Phase one is immediate. As of late June 2026, DSA campaign creation is fully restored. You can build new DSAs and edit existing ones without the recent restrictions. Phase two spans June 2026 through January 2027. Google calls this an extended testing and voluntary migration window. The whole point is that you choose when to move each account. Phase three lands in January 2027, when the ability to create new DSA campaigns disappears again, this time permanently. Phase four is February 2027, when any remaining DSA campaigns get automatically upgraded to AI Max for Search or to Performance Max, depending on the structure Google detects.

Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed the extension publicly on June 12. She framed the decision around advertiser feedback and the calendar. “We are extending the deadline. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear: you need more time to transition from Dynamic Search Ads,” Marvin wrote, as quoted by PPC Land. The original September date would have collided with Q4, the worst possible moment for an e-commerce or lead-gen account to absorb a forced format change.

What Did Not Change About DSA to AI Max

Two important pieces of the original announcement are still in place. First, the ultimate destination has not moved. DSA is still being retired. Phase three still removes new DSA creation, phase four still runs the automigration, and the long-term plan still ends with no DSA at all. Second, Automatically Created Assets and the campaign-level broad match setting are still upgrading to AI Max in September 2026 on the original timeline, which is the September 2026 migration deadline that did not move. The five-month delay applies only to DSA itself.

That second point matters for any account that uses ACA to expand creative reach. You still have a September 2026 deadline on the asset side, even while DSA itself sits on the February 2027 clock. Treat the two migrations as independent projects with different timelines, the same way you would scope an Asset Studio rollout for Performance Max without losing per-variant control.

The voluntary upgrade tools Google released in April 2026 are still available. According to Marvin, AI Max is also now the default when you create a new Search campaign, with internal testing showing campaigns hit their first conversion faster during the first two weeks. So even if you never touched a DSA migration, new Search campaigns spun up after the June change start under AI Max by default unless you opt out.

Why the DSA to AI Max Delay Is a Trap for Slow Movers

The temptation right now is to file this under “deal with it in Q1 2027” and move on. That is exactly the move that hurts the accounts that have been running DSAs for years and treat them as a safety net behind their core campaign mix.

Three quiet problems eat the slow movers. First, your DSA campaigns are sitting on years of conversion history that AI Max will not inherit cleanly in an automatic upgrade. Manual migrations preserve more of that signal because you choose the campaign structure and the bidding strategy yourself, the same logic we covered in how journey-aware bidding interprets conversion quality differently from raw counts. Second, the automigration in February lumps your campaigns into either AI Max for Search or Performance Max. That choice has enormous downstream consequences for reporting, asset control, and audience signals, and you have no input if you wait. Third, holiday-quarter performance data is the worst possible baseline for a major migration. If you let the automigration kick in February 2027, your bidding signals are still calibrating on December 2026 spikes that do not represent your true year-round economics.

The agencies that come out of this transition cleanly are the ones that run controlled side-by-side experiments now, while you can still create both DSA and AI Max campaigns. That is the operator move the extension actually enables.

The Four-Step DSA to AI Max Migration Plan You Should Run

Use the extended window to run a real test, not a hopeful one. Here is the four-step plan that fits inside the June 2026 to January 2027 voluntary phase, the same operator sequence behind the DSA-to-AI Max migration playbook.

Step one is the inventory pass. List every Google Ads account in your book that runs at least one DSA campaign. For each account, capture three things: the share of total Search spend that flows through DSA today, the conversion-to-call ratio for DSA versus exact and phrase match, and the historical CPL trend over the last twelve months. This is the baseline you will compare against AI Max performance. Pull it before you change a single setting.

Step two is the controlled experiment. Pick two or three accounts with stable DSA spend and clean conversion tracking, and build a parallel AI Max campaign targeting the same products or services. Run them in parallel for four weeks at matched budgets. The voluntary upgrade tools Google released in April make this easier than you think, and Google’s own testing suggests AI Max campaigns hit their first conversion faster, though your accounts may not see the same lift in CPL, which is what actually pays the bills. Document the comparison the same way you would document any nightly Google Ads anomaly check, so the deltas are visible to your team in the morning briefing.

Step three is the asset audit. Every AI Max migration touches Automatically Created Assets, which means your headlines and descriptions may get rewritten by Google’s models inside the new campaign. Pull the existing asset library for each migrating campaign and decide which assets you want pinned, which you are willing to let AI Max rotate, and which you should retire entirely. The same audit discipline we published for Google Ads placements after the Demand Gen exclusions disappeared applies here. The system fails safely when you have a clean asset inventory before the upgrade.

Step four is the migration sequencing decision. Once your test data is in, sort your DSA accounts into three buckets. Migrate now means AI Max already wins on your metrics, so move the account voluntarily before the deadline. Migrate later means the data is mixed and you want a longer test window. Hold means DSA still wins on your most important conversion signal, and you plan to keep the campaign until you are forced to migrate. Document the decision logic in the account record so the next person inheriting the book knows why the sequencing looks the way it does.

What the DSA to AI Max Decision Means for Your Reporting

One downstream effect that does not show up in the Google announcement is the reporting break. DSA reports give you per-target performance data tied to your URL feed or category-based targets. AI Max for Search does not give you the same view. You get aggregated performance across the campaign and the AI-selected search themes, with less granular control over which queries triggered which assets.

For most lead-gen accounts, this is a manageable trade because Google’s automated systems generally find converting traffic faster than a tightly tuned DSA target list. For e-commerce accounts with deep catalogs and category-level performance differences, the reporting change is a bigger deal. You may need to rebuild category-level reporting through your analytics stack or a BI tool rather than reading it out of Google Ads directly. The same principle applies as the Google Ads data retention reduction to 37 months taught us: your reporting model has to outlive the platform’s own data window.

If you run multi-account reporting through a third-party tool, check whether your dashboard already supports AI Max for Search metrics or still expects DSA-shaped data. Update the templates before the migration, not after, so you do not lose a month of clean reporting while you rebuild the views.

Action Steps for the Next 90 Days

You do not need to migrate every account in the next quarter. You do need to know where every account stands before September, because that is when Automatically Created Assets and broad match settings start their original migration on schedule, even though DSA itself slid to February.

In the next 30 days, finish the inventory pass and pull the baseline numbers. In the next 60 days, start the controlled experiment on two or three test accounts and book the four-week measurement window. In the next 90 days, sort your full book into the migrate-now, migrate-later, and hold buckets, and put each migration date on the same calendar you use for client renewals so no campaign quietly drifts past its decision point.

Two final notes. Keep an eye on the Google Ads change history feed inside your accounts during the extended window. Google has historically made smaller policy tweaks during these voluntary phases, the kind we tracked in the 2026 real-time policy review playbook. And tell every client whose account uses DSA today that the deadline moved, that you are running a test, and that the recommendation will come from data, not Google’s marketing copy.

If you want a second set of eyes on your DSA to AI Max migration plan before you start the experiment, book a free consultation and we will help you scope the test against your actual book of business. Let’s Grow!