Google Will Auto-Upgrade Your Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max Whether You're Ready or Not
Google is force-migrating Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max. The operator's runbook for porting negatives, URL rules, and reporting before the auto-upgrade flips.
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Your Dynamic Search Ads campaigns now carry an expiration date, and Google wrote it in ink. On April 15, 2026, Google announced that DSA is sunsetting into AI Max for Search, with auto-upgrades originally slated for September 2026. Advertisers pushed back. On June 11, 2026, Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed the main auto-migration slips to February 2027, as reported by Search Engine Land.
Do not read that as a reprieve. Two things stay on the original clock. Campaigns using Automatically Created Assets or the campaign-level broad match setting still begin auto-upgrading in September 2026, per Google's own announcement. And the ability to create new DSA campaigns disappears in January 2027, across the UI, Google Ads Editor, and the API. After that, any DSA still running gets converted on Google's terms, with Google's defaults.
You have a window. Use it.
The dates that matter
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| April 15, 2026 | DSA sunset announced; AI Max for Search reaches general availability; voluntary upgrade tools roll out |
| June 11, 2026 | Google delays the main DSA auto-migration from September 2026 to February 2027 |
| September 2026 | Campaigns with Automatically Created Assets or campaign-level broad match begin auto-upgrading to AI Max |
| January 2027 | Ability to create new DSA campaigns removed in Google Ads, Editor, and the API |
| February 2027 | Remaining active DSA campaigns are automatically upgraded to AI Max |
Search Engine Land reports that Google is urging advertisers to audit existing DSA campaigns, run side-by-side experiments, and use the voluntary migration tools before February 2027, because manual upgrades preserve oversight and historical reporting. Translation: the auto-upgrade is the worst version of this migration. Everything below is about avoiding it.
What actually changes under the hood
DSA reads your site and page feeds, matches queries keywordlessly, and generates headlines from page content inside dedicated dynamic ad groups. AI Max replaces all of that with three features layered onto standard Search campaigns: search term matching (keywordless expansion), text customization (Gemini-written headlines and descriptions), and final URL expansion (Google picks the landing page).
The controls map differently, and this is where accounts get hurt:
- Page feeds and dynamic ad targets become URL inclusion and exclusion rules under final URL expansion. There is no feed. Your carefully labeled feed segments do not translate one-to-one.
- Negative dynamic ad targets (excluded pages, categories) become URL exclusions. Auto-migration mirrors your legacy setup where it can, but the mapping logic is Google's, and edge cases get flattened.
- Negative keywords carry over in the voluntary upgrade flow, which ports historical settings into new standard ad groups. In a forced upgrade you get defaults configured to approximate your old setup. Approximate is doing heavy lifting in that sentence.
Google's pitch for the destination is real but conditional. Per Google Ads Help, advertisers activating AI Max typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS (Google internal data, 2025, non-retail advertisers). Google's April blog post adds a 7% average lift for campaigns running the full feature suite versus partial adoption. Meanwhile, Adalysis found in testing that AI Max frequently serves on the same queries your exact and phrase keywords already cover, and that brand inclusion and exclusion filters miss common misspellings and word variations. Claimed lift and observed incrementality are different animals. Measure your own.
Pre-flight check 1: port your negatives before Google ports them for you
Run this per DSA campaign. Budget an afternoon per ten campaigns.
- Export every campaign-level and ad-group-level negative keyword. Editor makes this a five-minute job.
- Export your negative dynamic ad targets: excluded URLs, page titles, categories. These need to become URL exclusions in AI Max, and the auto-migration will not read your intent.
- Rebuild keyword negatives as shared negative lists at the account level, then attach them to the successor campaigns. Shared lists survive restructures; campaign-level negatives die with the campaign.
- Build a dedicated brand negative list to split brand from non-brand traffic. Adalysis specifically recommends negative lists over AI Max's brand controls for this, because the brand filters leak misspellings.
- Pull 12 months of DSA search terms, sort by spend with zero conversions, and pre-load those as negatives in the new structure. AI Max's keywordless matching will rediscover every bad query DSA ever found. Make it start from your floor, from day one.
This is the same hygiene that separates disciplined accounts from lucky ones in any automated buying environment, whether that's ecommerce ROAS scaling or keywordless search.
Pre-flight check 2: convert page feeds to URL rules
Final URL expansion is the piece most likely to embarrass you in front of a client. Google choosing landing pages means Google can choose your careers page, your out-of-stock PDPs, or a 2019 blog post.
- Inventory every page feed and every dynamic ad target across all DSA campaigns. Note which segments actually spent money.
- Map each feed segment to a URL inclusion rule (URL contains, exact URL, or category). Keep the rules broad enough to let expansion work, tight enough to stay commercial.
- Write your URL exclusions first, before enabling expansion: /careers, /blog, /support, /legal, out-of-stock states, staging subdomains. Google's documentation confirms you can also add negative URLs directly from the search terms report once live, but pre-loading beats whack-a-mole.
- Turn final URL expansion on for one mid-stakes campaign. Watch the landing page report for two weeks. Then scale the pattern.
If your URLs carry inconsistent tracking parameters, fix that before migration; keywordless campaigns are unforgiving to messy attribution. Our Attribution Doctor will flag the gaps in minutes.
Pre-flight check 3: reset your reporting expectations
Your DSA search terms report has a shape your stakeholders know. That shape changes.
AI Max reporting centers on search term and ad combination views, which show which terms triggered keywordless matching and which landing pages Google selected. In the UI, the search terms report gains source columns and lets you exclude a term as a negative keyword or a page as a negative URL in two clicks. In the API, the same data lives in a dedicated ad-combination view.
Three moves before the switch:
- Snapshot 12 months of DSA performance now: search terms, landing pages, CPA by feed segment. Manual migration into new ad groups means new entity IDs; your historical DSA data stays attached to the old structure, so export it while the joins are easy.
- Pre-brief stakeholders that query-level transparency shifts. Some volume lands in aggregated buckets, and headline text is Gemini-generated, so ad copy reporting becomes directional.
- Set a pre-migration baseline for CPA, ROAS, and impression share, and hold the new campaigns to it for 30 days before judging. Benchmark against category norms in our Paid Media Benchmarks 2026 report rather than against Google's averages.
Run the migration yourself
The voluntary upgrade tools, live since April, port historical settings and data into new standard ad groups. That is strictly better than what the February 2027 auto-upgrade will do to you. Sequence it: lowest-stakes DSA campaign first, one week of monitoring, then the next tier. Keep search term matching on but hold text customization and final URL expansion until your exclusions are proven. The 7% full-suite lift Google cites is only worth chasing after the guardrails hold.
Treat this like any forced platform change: the operators who move early get to choose their settings, and the ones who wait inherit defaults. We saw the same dynamic play out in SaaS ad targeting as broad match plus Smart Bidding ate exact-match structures, and in trial-to-paid optimization as automated bidding absorbed manual levers. Automation rewards preparation and punishes drift.
The switch flips itself in February 2027, and for ACA and broad-match campaigns it starts flipping in September 2026. Every week you wait is a week Google's defaults get closer to writing your Q1 numbers.