On September 23, Google confirmed two things at once: first, that automatic migration of Dynamic Search Ads campaigns and related formats to AI Max wraps up on September 30 — literally this week; second, that the unified report meant to finally make AI Max's decisions transparent won't arrive until "later this year," with no firm date attached. Between those two dates — the campaign migration and the arrival of a tool to actually audit it — sits a window of several months during which the campaign owner will be managing a black box almost blind.
This isn't a cosmetic interface update. AI Max is a system that decides on its own which additional queries to show an ad against, which creatives to swap in, and which page to send the user to, blending advertiser inputs with real-time intent signals. Google says that campaigns using the full AI Max feature set see an average of 7% more conversions at a similar CPA/ROAS. The problem is that, until now, auditing those decisions meant manually cross-checking three separate reports — and that's exactly the pain point the upcoming unified report is meant to fix, with one row per search term showing both the creative served and the landing page reached.
What a business actually loses by simply waiting for the automatic migration
Take a hypothetical example: a chain of three dental clinics in the Lisbon area runs Dynamic Search Ads campaigns tied to a set of old landing pages, some of which haven't been updated in about two years. If the owner just waits for September 30 and does nothing beforehand, Google will carry the settings over "as is" — including outdated URL controls and stale brand restrictions. After the migration, the campaign will technically keep running, but the advertiser loses the baseline for comparison: there's no way to know which search terms and landing pages the system is now choosing instead of the old logic, not until the unified report ships — which could be December, or January.
Three things to do before September 30, not after
The practical takeaway is simple, and fairly unglamorous — which is exactly why it gets skipped. You need to document the current state of your campaigns before the automatic transfer: pull the actual search terms and landing pages from the past 2-3 months, so you have something to compare against afterward. You need to manually set brand restrictions, geo-targeting, and text guidelines ahead of time, rather than assume Google will copy your DSA logic one-to-one — it often won't. And you need to put a check on the calendar for 3-4 weeks after the migration, once enough data has accumulated for a first read, rather than waiting on the official report. For a small marketing team, that's about half an hour of work per active campaign — far less than the time it'll take later to untangle a conversion drop with no baseline to compare against.
To be fair, AI Max itself has an objective limitation that Google doesn't exactly advertise: the claimed 7% lift is an average across all program participants, not a guarantee for any specific niche. For narrow B2B segments with low traffic volume (say, an industrial design studio with a dozen target queries a month), this kind of automation tends to perform worse than in high-volume consumer niches, simply because the system doesn't have enough data to learn from. Blindly trusting the average percentage in the reports isn't a great strategy for a small ad budget.
There's a second subtlety that's easy to miss: AI Max's expanded text guidelines and brand restrictions are technically available, but by default Google sets them to "mirror" the previous DSA logic — and that old logic, at the same dental clinic chain, might have served ads against irrelevant queries like "free dentist" for years, simply because nobody ever cleaned up the negative keywords. The automatic migration inherits those flaws exactly as they are unless someone fixes them by hand before September 30. After the migration, fixing them gets noticeably harder, because you'd have to separate errors from the old logic from AI Max's own new decisions — and telling them apart without the unified report, which Google is being vague about, is close to impossible.
It's precisely in transition periods like this — when a platform changes the rules and the control tools aren't there yet — that automated ad-campaign monitoring pays off fastest. At Dayava, we build exactly these kinds of control systems for businesses that can't afford to lose visibility into their advertising during moments like this one. If a similar solution interests you for your business, leave a request at dayava.pt/contactos/.
Source: Digital Applied, "AI Max Gets One Report as Google's September Move Ends"