Artificial intelligence has been used in Google Ads for years in core features such as smart bidding. Numerous new features have been released over the last few years. In this article we’ll cover some of the AI products and features that Google Ads has released and our experience with them.
Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max campaigns were rolled out in November 2021, there’s been mixed feedback on how advertisers feel about them and the results generated. We’ve been actively running Performance Max campaigns across our ad accounts and these are some of the experiences and results we have had with them.
All conclusions drawn in the below points are from our own experience running Performance Max campaigns across a different industries, with different marketing objectives.
- We have seen strong performance from Performance Max campaigns that are running with a product focus or are using conversion value focused bid models.
- When running Performance Max campaigns for lead generation, they tend to focus a lot more on display type advertising and have a tendency to generate low quality leads & conversions.
- When running Performance Max campaigns, you need to stay on top of your campaign targeting and refinements. If using features such as Final URL expansion. Make sure you have excluded unwanted URLs or you could be advertising blog posts rather than product or service pages.
- If you are running advertising in specific locations, ensure you have all surrounding locations excluded from location targeting. From our experience, Performance Max campaigns have a tendency to disregard location targeting settings.
AI Max for Search
AI Max for Search has been a more recent feature from the Google Ads team. The global rollout started in July 2025 and is now being actively pushed to advertisers. Since the rollout of AI Max, we have run countless experiments in a range of different industries.
The conclusions we have drawn from AI Max is that its targeting is incredibly broad. Similar to Performance Max, keep on top of your targeting or you can start wasting ad spend quickly.
Overall we have found that AI Max (in its current form) isn’t providing better ROI than a normal search campaign.
The odd additional keyword has been identified, but overall, very few positive results have been generated in the experiments we’ve conducted. This may differ for more basic campaigns without extensive targeting, however we recommend caution. The shift to AI features follows a common trend of creating broader campaign targeting rather than more refined.
Conclusion
Both positive and negative results have been seen from artificial intelligence features within Google Ads. There are areas where it can be used to great effect, but also areas where further improvements are needed. As always, the more you review and refine your ad targeting, the better the ROI.