The Google Ads API update that finally gives Performance Planner teeth

What the Google Ads API v25.1 update actually changed#

A fox does not need to see the whole thicket to know something has shifted in it. One snapped twig, one fresh scent on the wind, and the picture reassembles itself. Google Ads API advertisers had exactly that kind of week: three separate announcements, released four days apart, that only make sense read together.

On 19 August 2026, Google shipped Google Ads API v25.1, a drop-in upgrade that adds read-only resources for Conversion Lift and Brand Lift studies, a Brand Sentiment Insights service, loyalty programme segmentation and a new original_conversion_value metric showing what a conversion was worth before Google's own value rules touched it. Search Engine Land called the Google Ads API release largely a measurement upgrade, and that reading holds: nothing in v25.1 changes how a campaign runs, only how much of the running an advertiser is allowed to see.

The very next day, 20 August, Google published new AI Max testing and planning tools: multi-campaign A/B tests arriving in September that check the effect of a budget or ROI target shift across several Search campaigns at once, AI Max Google Ads experiments that finally support brand and location controls without switching those guardrails off, and a Performance Planner that applies its own suggested changes with a single click.

Brandon Ervin, Google's Director of Product Management for Search Ads, framed it as giving advertisers a clearer view before they scale AI Max Google Ads campaigns. It is a generous way to describe building a dashboard for a decision that, for a great many accounts, has already been taken out of their hands.

The quiet clause buried under the measurement news#

Because here is the part the press release voice glides past. Two weeks before the Google Ads API v25.1 update shipped, on 12 August, Google's own developer blog quietly confirmed the mechanics of a forced AI Max migration first flagged back in April: every Search campaign still running Campaign-level Broad Match or standalone Automatically Created Assets moves to AI Max between 1 and 30 September 2026. Not a suggestion, not an opt-out prompt.

An automatic in-place upgrade, and Google even shipped the field to prove it: a Google Ads API query against campaign.aca_migration_date_time and campaign.broad_match_migration_date_time tells a developer exactly which campaigns have already moved, at any point during the month, whether the account manager watched it happen or not.

Read the calendar the way a fox reads a hedgerow gap it did not dig: someone else decided where the path goes, and the only real choice left is how quickly you notice.

Why AI Max Google Ads control disappears this September#

This is the part worth sitting with before the next chart. AI Max Google Ads is not a new campaign type an advertiser opts into on a quiet afternoon. According to Google's own setup documentation, new Search campaigns already have AI Max turned on by default, with text customisation and final URL expansion enabled from the first save.

What the September migration does is close the last gap: the campaigns built before that default existed, the ones still running Campaign-level Broad Match or a standalone Automatically Created Assets setup, get folded into the same AI Max Google Ads automation whether the team managing them has tested it or not.

The two cohorts land differently, and the difference matters to anyone auditing an account this month. Campaigns using the campaign-level broad match setting inherit search term matching alone, Google's phrase for letting the system chase queries beyond the literal keyword list. Campaigns using Automatically Created Assets inherit both search term matching and text customisation, meaning the platform starts writing headline and description variants as well as choosing which queries to chase.

Existing brand inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically in both cases, and pinned assets in responsive search ads stay pinned, which is the one genuinely reassuring detail in an otherwise one-way AI Max Google Ads door.

Dynamic Search Ads get a longer runway, and the story behind that extension is its own small lesson in how these deadlines actually move. Google first grouped all three legacy features into a single September migration back in April. In June, DSA alone was pushed to February 2027, citing fourth-quarter planning risk, while Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets kept their original date.

Search Engine Land's coverage of the confirmed timeline notes that reminder notices for DSA advertisers do not go out until 15 January 2027, a full four months after the broad match and asset cohorts have already moved. A deadline that can be quietly delayed once, for one segment, is not evidence the whole AI Max Google Ads migration is soft. It is evidence Google treats each cohort's readiness separately, and that the September date for everyone else was never on the table for the same reprieve.

None of this is theoretical hedging. It is the kind of forced platform change that manufactures switching intent overnight, precisely because nobody chose the timing. An account still leaning on manual query control, still trusting hand-written ad copy over generated variants, loses that trust window on a date it did not pick.

The fox that waits for the hedgerow to open on its own terms is the fox that goes hungry. The smarter move with AI Max Google Ads is auditing which campaigns are affected before the calendar does it for you.

What the new Google Ads API reporting and testing tools actually unlock#

Set against that forced calendar, the Google Ads API measurement upgrades in v25.1 read less like generosity and more like Google building the instrumentation a much larger automated system now needs. The 24 new Conversion Lift metrics and the Brand Lift dimension resources (age range, campaign, device, gender, video) are read-only, and both features stay allowlisted: an advertiser has to contact a Google account representative to switch them on at all, which keeps the sharpest new Google Ads measurement tools out of reach for most of the accounts about to be auto-migrated.

Loyalty, sentiment and the value Google adjusts away#

Two of the quieter Google Ads API additions matter more than their billing suggests. Loyalty programme segmentation lets an advertiser split reporting by which loyalty tier a converting customer belongs to, and a new LOYALTY_MEMBERSHIP dimension tracks when that condition triggered a conversion value rule. Paired with the new original_conversion_value metric, an advertiser can finally see a conversion's raw value before Google's own lifecycle and value-rule adjustments touch it, a genuinely useful audit trail for anyone who has ever asked why a reported number moved without a campaign change to explain it.

Brand Sentiment Insights, meanwhile, folds sentiment distribution and summary data for creators and brands into ContentCreatorInsightsService, extending the kind of intelligence usually reserved for social platforms into the Google Ads API itself. It is a small tell about where Google expects advertising judgement to sit next: not purely in bid strategy, but in reading the mood a piece of creative lands in.

The testing side of the week's news is the most defensible part of it. Multi-campaign A/B testing, arriving in September, finally answers a fair question agencies have asked since AI Max Google Ads left beta: does a budget or ROI target change actually help across an account, or only inside the one campaign it was tested on?

Search Engine Land's coverage notes the update also removes a real obstacle: AI Max experiments now support brand and location controls, so a regulated or geo-restricted advertiser no longer has to strip those guardrails just to run the test. That is a genuine improvement, arriving four months after the feature it is meant to de-risk went out of beta rather than before.

The Performance Planner update is the quieter half of the same announcement, and arguably the more useful one for anyone building a budget case. The expanded Performance Planner now forecasts how a bidding or budget change would ripple through existing campaigns, and lets an advertiser apply Google's own suggested changes directly with a single click, shortening the gap between forecasting a move and actually making it. Paired with the Google Ads API's new lift and loyalty resources, a Performance Planner forecast finally has real Performance Max reporting sitting underneath it, rather than a projection nobody could later check.

Read together, the pattern is consistent rather than contradictory. Google gives advertisers a wider window to test AI Max Google Ads and a deeper set of reports to measure it, in the same fortnight it confirms that a large slice of accounts never get to decide whether to run the test at all. The testing tools are for the campaigns that still have a choice. The migration calendar is for the ones that no longer do.

Does AI Max actually outperform what it replaces#

Google's own help centre for AI Max for search still cites the beta-era headline: 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar cost per acquisition, drawn from Google's internal 2025 data for non-retail advertisers. By the time AI Max reached general availability in April 2026, that figure had been quietly revised down to an average of 7% across the full feature suite, as ppc.land's reporting on the migration timeline documents. Halving your own claim before the forced upgrade date is not a confidence signal.

Independent testing tells a rougher story again. An analysis of more than 250 retail campaigns by Smarter Ecommerce found median revenue rose 13% under AI Max, but median cost per acquisition rose 16% alongside it, with individual campaign ROAS swinging anywhere from plus 42% to minus 35%. The same study flagged that up to 63% of the queries AI Max's keywordless expansion surfaced as new were simply recycling coverage the account already had, a maths trick dressed as reach.

Two smaller data points round out the picture, both worth a sceptical read rather than blind trust, and both worth citing precisely because they cut against Google's own framing. A four-month independent comparison found AI Max Google Ads search term matching converting at $100.37 per acquisition against $43.97 for a controlled phrase match campaign, a 128% cost gap between the two.

Separately, ppc.land's reporting notes an analysis by Monks finding 99% of AI Max impressions across roughly 30,000 search terms produced zero conversions, and a separate finding that AI Max's expansion onto Search Partner Network placements ran at a return on ad spend 37% below Google Search proper.

AI Max vs PMax, and why the comparison keeps coming up#

AI Max vs PMax is the search practitioners keep running because the two features are frequently confused and increasingly entangled. AI Max Google Ads is an optimisation layer inside a Search campaign: it widens query matching and generates creative, but the campaign remains a Search campaign, with Search-only inventory.

Performance Max is a distinct campaign type spanning Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps inventory in one automated bidding pool. The two increasingly share plumbing (text customisation and final URL expansion appear in both) but they are not interchangeable, and choosing between AI Max Google Ads and Performance Max is a targeting decision, not a preference for one flavour of automation over another.

One honest cross-platform contrast is worth sitting with before deciding how much control compression to accept. Microsoft's own AI Max, rolled out globally the same week as Google's migration news, bundles the same three features (search term matching, text customisation, final URL expansion) but keeps the whole suite opt-in for every account.

Navah Hopkins, Microsoft Advertising's Product Liaison, described it as complementary automation advertisers choose to test rather than something applied to them. That single word, opt-in, is the entire distance between the two companies' approach to AI Max Google Ads this month.

The Local Services Ads discontinuity, and what to audit first#

A second, quieter discontinuity lands on the same calendar, and it deserves its own audit line rather than a footnote. Google has begun folding Local Services Ads, the pay-per-lead campaigns behind the Google Guaranteed badge, into Performance Max. According to Search Engine Journal's coverage of the migration, published today, the first group of US advertisers is already moving, with the rest following in phases through 2027.

The placements stay the same, Search and Maps, and the pay-per-lead billing model survives the move. What does not survive cleanly is the reporting underneath it: at least one piece of account history disappears on migration day unless an advertiser exports it beforehand, and cost per lead can shift once bidding automates inside PMax's shared pool, the same shared pool AI Max Google Ads campaigns increasingly feed into.

This is the trap for the trades folkfox clients most often serve through Local Services Ads: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, cleaning, roofing, pest control and moving. A locksmith or an electrician does not read a quarterly benchmark report to know whether last winter's cold snap drove leads or the campaign did; they read the account's own historical numbers, month over month, against the jobs that actually booked.

If that trail goes quiet on migration day because nobody exported it first, the account loses its own memory at precisely the moment its bidding starts behaving differently.

A regulated or lead-sensitive account has one genuine advantage here that a casual one does not: the habit of documenting everything for compliance already builds most of the audit trail this AI Max Google Ads migration needs. Export the historical Local Services Ads reporting now, not on the day an account manager notices it is gone.

Pull the GAQL migration fields for every Search campaign to see which ones move first. And treat the new AI Max experiment controls, brand and location guardrails included, as the one part of this fortnight's AI Max Google Ads news that is genuinely worth using before the deadline forces the rest of the decision.

None of this argues for panic. It argues for a diary entry, a data export and a short account audit, the same practical prowl folkfox runs for every client carrying PPC spend through a regulated or lead-driven category.

If a client's Search campaigns run through a vertical like fintech marketing, where a financial planner's lead cost is watched as closely as the leads themselves, the same AI Max Google Ads audit applies before Local Services Ads billing habits change underfoot. The fox that scents the change early is the fox that is never caught flat-footed by it.

Frequently asked questions#