If you run Google Ads for your contracting business and you haven't logged into your account since August, go look at it this week. Something in there may have changed without you touching a single setting.
Beginning September 1, Google started automatically upgrading Search campaigns that use campaign-level broad match or standalone automatically created assets over to AI Max — its keywordless, AI-driven Search format. The rollout runs gradually through the month. There was no opt-in. There was no approval step. You didn't miss an email; there wasn't one that needed your answer.
This isn't a conspiracy, and it's not a bug. Google announced the move well in advance. But announcements live in in-account notifications and industry blogs, and most plumbing, HVAC, roofing, and electrical owners read neither. You have a business to run. So here's what happened, what it means for your ad spend, and the five things to check before your budget does the learning for you.
What actually changed, and when
The timeline is worth pinning down, because the deadlines are real and some of them have already passed:
- August 3, 2026 — Google stopped allowing anyone to create new campaign-level broad match setups or legacy automatically created assets, across the Ads interface, Ads Editor, and the API. The door closed first.
- September 1–30, 2026 — Automatic migration of those campaigns to AI Max. This is the window we're sitting in right now.
- September 2026 — In-account notices encouraging advertisers to voluntarily move Dynamic Search Ads over too.
- February 2027 — Dynamic Search Ads migrate automatically, and creating new DSA ad groups is removed permanently.
Google says campaigns are migrated in place using "equivalent AI Max settings" to limit disruption, and that existing brand inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically. That's reassuring language. But "equivalent settings" is not the same as "identical behavior" — and for a contractor paying per click, the difference between those two phrases is money.
What AI Max is, in plain English
Legacy Search campaigns were built around keywords you chose. You picked the words, set the match types, wrote the ads. Even when you used broad match at the campaign level, you had a keyword structure you could see and reason about — a net you could see the edges of.
AI Max is Google's keywordless Search format. Instead of matching your ads to the keywords you listed, the AI reads your landing pages, your assets, and your stated goals, then decides for itself which searches your ads should appear on. It expands more aggressively than the old setup — it's designed to find conversions outside whatever keyword structure you built, with more creative automation layered on top.
Used deliberately, that can be a genuine win. Google's AI has more signal than it did five years ago, and some contractors will find it surfaces profitable searches they never would have guessed. Inherited involuntarily, on the same budget, with the same landing pages and no review, it can quietly change which searches you're paying for — and the clicks can start looking a lot less like your customers.
That's the core risk. Not that AI Max is bad. That it changed under you while your budget kept spending.
Why this hits contractors harder than most
Think about how a contractor's Google Ads account usually looks. You got it set up — maybe by an agency, maybe by a nephew, maybe by you at 11 PM three years ago — and then you left it alone because it worked. The account has a certain shape: a handful of campaigns around your services, keywords like "emergency plumber near me" and "ac repair palm beach," a budget that felt reasonable at the time.
That set-and-forget shape is exactly the account most vulnerable to this migration. The campaigns that relied on campaign-level broad match — the ones casting the widest net — are the ones Google migrated. And broad match was doing real work for contractors: catching the oddball searches ("my water heater is making a banging noise," "ac blowing warm air at night") that a keyword list never fully anticipates.
Here's the problem in concrete terms. Under the old setup, your broad match campaigns caught searches your keyword list didn't anticipate, but you could still see the structure. You knew roughly which searches you were eligible for. Under AI Max, the AI has more latitude to decide. Without guardrails, the same daily budget can drift toward searches that are technically relevant but commercially wrong — the DIYer looking for repair videos, the job seeker looking for work, the person searching for a part to fix it themselves. Every one of those is a click you paid for that never becomes a job.
The advertisers who'll have a bad month are the ones who don't notice for six weeks. By then the account has spent a month and a half training on the wrong signals, and the cleanup costs you twice: once in wasted spend, once in the time it takes to retrain the automation on the right ones.
The five things to check this week
Set aside a couple of hours. This is the highest-leverage maintenance you can do on your marketing right now.
1. Confirm whether you were migrated
Open your Google Ads account and look at your Search campaigns for AI Max settings that weren't there in August. If you're not sure what you're looking at, the campaign settings page will tell you directly. Write down which campaigns were migrated and when — you'll want that date for step 5.
If you use the Google Ads mobile app, note that some of these settings are easier to find on desktop. This is a desktop job.
2. Read your search terms report — all of it
This is the single most useful half hour you can spend on your ads right now. Pull the search terms report and read what people actually typed before they saw your ad. You're looking for searches you would never have chosen to bid on.
Compare the last two weeks against the two weeks before September 1. That's your before-and-after picture: the migration line is right there in the data. If the "after" side is full of searches that make you squint — wrong services, wrong geography, wrong intent — you've found your leak.
For contractors specifically, watch for these patterns: DIY and how-to searches ("how to replace a capacitor"), job-seeker traffic ("hvac apprentice jobs near me"), parts and supply searches ("water heater element lowes"), and out-of-area searches that slipped past your location settings. None of these people are hiring you. All of them cost you money.
3. Build out your negative keyword list
With broader matching doing more of the work, exclusions are how you keep control. Every irrelevant search term you found in step 2 is a negative keyword you should be adding. This is the single biggest lever you have under AI Max, and it's the one most small-business accounts neglect.
Contractor starter negatives: "jobs," "careers," "salary," "diy," "how to," "youtube," "parts," "supplies," "home depot," "lowes," "free," "course," "certification." Then add whatever your search terms report showed you. This list is never finished — review it weekly while the migration settles, monthly after that.
4. Check your brand inclusions and exclusions
Google says brand inclusions and exclusions carried over automatically in the migration. Verify it anyway. This matters especially if you'd deliberately excluded competitor terms or your own brand terms from general campaigns (a common setup: brand searches run cheaper in their own campaign, and mixing them into general campaigns muddies the numbers).
If you never set brand exclusions up in the first place, the migration is a good excuse to do it now. Under broader automation, brand bleed — paying for clicks on your own company name inside a general campaign — gets harder to spot and easier to misread as performance.
5. Compare cost per lead, not clicks
This is where most contractors get fooled. After a migration, you might see more impressions and cheaper clicks. That looks like a win. It can be a mirage: more reach at a lower click cost, while the quality of the leads quietly drops.
Judge the migration on what a lead costs and whether those leads are people you actually want — not on click volume, not on impression share, not on click-through rate. Pull your cost per lead for September to date and compare it against August. Then go one level deeper: compare cost per qualified lead. A $25 lead from someone who needs a full system replacement is not the same as a $25 lead from someone who wants a free quote on a ten-minute job. If your tracking lets you separate them, separate them.
Check your conversion tracking while you're in there
This matters more now than it did a year ago, and it's the thing most often broken.
Google's automated bidding optimizes toward whatever you've told it counts as a conversion. Under AI Max, that optimization has more authority than before. If your conversion tracking is broken — counting the wrong things, double-counting, or quietly dead — the system will optimize confidently toward nothing. And it'll look like a performance problem instead of a measurement problem.
Tracking breaks silently. No error message, no alert. A website redesign, a new form plugin, a changed thank-you page URL — any of those can kill it without anyone noticing. The account keeps spending, the reports keep generating, and the numbers slowly lie to you.
If you're not sure how your conversions are being recorded, don't guess. Get someone who does this for a living to audit it. That audit is worth more than another month of ad budget spent blind.
If someone else manages your ads
Ask them three questions this week. Not next month — this week:
- Were any of our campaigns migrated to AI Max in September?
- What changed in our search terms since September 1?
- What's our cost per qualified lead now versus August?
If those answers don't come back quickly and specifically — with actual search terms, actual numbers — that tells you something on its own. You're not asking for a dissertation. You're asking whether the person managing your money noticed that the machine changed.
This is, frankly, the moment that separates ad managers from ad babysitters. Anyone can watch a dashboard. The job is noticing when the platform moves underneath the account and putting the guardrails back in place: negatives, brand exclusions, budget caps, clean conversion data. If your current setup can't tell you what changed in September, it's not really a setup — it's a subscription.
What's coming next
The September migration isn't the end of the story. In-account notices are already encouraging advertisers to voluntarily move Dynamic Search Ads over, and the automatic DSA migration runs February 2027, after which creating new DSA ad groups is permanently removed. If you're still running Dynamic Search Ads, you have a decision to make: move on your own terms now, or be moved in February.
One more note for anyone with scripts or third-party tools connected to Google Ads: future API versions released after September 1 drop support for the legacy structures entirely. If anything automated touches your account — reporting scripts, bid rules, integrations — it needs updating. Don't discover that the morning your reports go blank.
The bottom line
Google is moving everyone toward AI-run Search campaigns, and the window to be surprised by it is now. You can't opt out of the migration. But you can decide how much room the automation gets — through negatives, brand exclusions, budget caps, and clean conversion data.
The accounts that do well under AI Max are the ones with a human watching the search terms every week. That hasn't changed at all. The technology got more automated; the need for someone paying attention got bigger, not smaller.
Want someone to check what changed in your account?
That's literally what we do. AdsHandled runs Facebook and Google ads for contractors — one flat $399/month management fee, first month free — and every engagement starts with a free ad audit: a real look at what's in your account right now, what's working, what's leaking, and what the September migration actually did to you. No obligation, no sales gauntlet. Just the audit.
If your search terms report shows searches that make you squint, or if you couldn't confidently answer the three questions above, that's exactly what the audit is for. Reach out through adshandled.com and we'll take a look.
AdsHandled runs Facebook and Google ads for contractors: one flat management fee, first month free, starting with a free ad audit. No ROAS or lead guarantees are published — what we publish is flat-fee management, a free audit, and reporting you can actually read.