Google AI Max: the new report that shows what it wrote, and the controls that limit where it spends

Google AI Max for Search widens which searches your ads can match and writes ad text for you, which until now made it hard to see what Google actually showed to whom. This week that changed in two ways. A new report, first reported in an advertiser's account on 14 October, lists each search term next to the headlines, landing page and asset source that served it. And on the same day Google announced channel prioritisation and budget caps that limit where Performance Max, Search, Shopping and Demand Gen money goes. Neither explains why the automation chose what it did, but together they make an audit possible.

What changed in Google Ads this week

Google's own pages describe both features. How available each one is differs, so check before planning around it.

The prioritisation controls cover Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen, at account or campaign level, and also apply to shared budgets. To keep today's behaviour for a Search campaign that uses the Display Network, Google says to set the Display Network to low priority with a 50% budget allocation before February.

What the AI Max search terms and ad combinations report shows

Google's help page describes the view as the search terms that triggered your ads alongside the headlines, landing pages, campaigns and ad groups that made up each path. According to Search Engine Roundtable, the report also shows descriptions, whether traffic came from AI Max's expanded matching or from landing page and URL inclusions, and whether the assets were supplied by the advertiser or not.

That last field matters most. AI Max can write headlines from your site and existing ads. For the first time, you can see a Google-written headline next to the exact search it answered and the page the click landed on. You find it in the Search terms report, under the Search terms dropdown, as "Search terms and ad combinations" (it was previously called search terms and landing pages from AI Max). From the same view you can exclude a poor search term as a negative keyword, or a poor landing page as a negative URL.

What it does not show is the reasoning. It tells you which combination served; it does not tell you why the system preferred it, or what it would have shown instead. Treat it as a record of outputs to check, not an explanation.

How to audit Google AI Max with the new report

1. Export a few weeks of combinations. Sort by spend so the review starts where the money is.
2. Separate Google-written from advertiser-written assets. Review the Google-written ones first, because nobody on your team approved them.
3. Check every claim. Prices, guarantees, delivery times and anything regulated. An automated headline can be fluent and wrong. Length is the one thing you can check with code; our guide to Google RSA character limits includes a checker.
4. Tag each served headline. Label its angle, offer and persona the same way every time, so you can count which ones convert rather than reading rows one by one.
5. Look for mismatches. A search term with clear intent, an off-topic headline, or a landing page that does not answer the query is a candidate for exclusion.
6. Exclude, then wait. Add the worst search terms and URLs as negatives, and give the campaign time before judging the change.

Step 4 is the one that turns a report into knowledge. It is the same method as in our guide to Performance Max asset testing: describe every asset with fixed labels, and the results start adding up across campaigns instead of staying as one-off winners.

Do the new channel controls change anything?

For some campaigns, a lot. Google's own announcement makes a useful admission: for campaigns bidding to a Target CPA or Target ROAS, prioritisation alone often has little effect, because the budget is not what limits spend. The percentage cap on low-priority channels is the lever that matters there.

So for a Performance Max campaign where you suspect too much money reaches lower-value placements, mark those channels low priority and set an allocation. Expect it to be respected approximately, since Google describes the cap as best effort, and check spend by channel after a week. And if you run Search with the Display Network on, put the February 2027 change in your calendar now rather than finding a shifted spend split in the new year.

Who checks the work when Google writes the ad

The pattern is the same one we described after Meta's Advertising Week announcements: the platform writes the ad, picks where it runs, sets the bid and reports the result. This week's report is a genuine step towards letting advertisers check, and it is worth using. It is still the seller of the impressions deciding what you get to see. An independent check, run on your side, is the complement to it. The same gap is wider for Google AI Mode ads, where AI Mode results are not reported separately at all. Coverage of how other platforms are automating collects in the AI ad platforms hub.

Where gloofy fits, and where it does not

Tagging served headlines with the same labels every time is the job gloofy's creative tagging does, described under what gloofy does. It runs on your own machine, so search terms and ad copy never leave it. On exam v3.3 of our public marketing benchmark, 150 real published ads scored by exact label match, the released gloofy-14b adapter scores 0.816 and the published 4B model 0.796, against 0.825 for Mistral Large 3. At 150 items the top results are within measurement error of each other, so the accurate description is tied, not ahead. Closed frontier models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic were not measured on v3.3; on the earlier exam, which had a faulty answer key, Claude and Gemini scored higher. The released files are listed under the gloofy models.

It does not connect to Google Ads, read the report for you, predict conversions or decide exclusions. It labels the text you give it. What you do with the counts is still your call.

What to do this week

• Open the Search terms report in each AI Max campaign and check whether the "Search terms and ad combinations" option is there.
• Review the highest-spend Google-written headlines for claims your legal or brand team would not approve.
• Tag served headlines by angle and offer, and compare conversion rates by tag rather than by row.
• If Performance Max spend drifts to placements you value less, set them to low priority with an allocation cap once the setting appears.
• Note February 2027 for Search campaigns with the Display Network, and for Dynamic Search Ads moving to AI Max.

FAQ

What is Google AI Max for Search?

AI Max for Search is a Google Ads setting that lets Search campaigns match a wider range of queries and generate ad text and landing page choices automatically. Google Ads Help says Dynamic Search Ads campaigns will be upgraded to AI Max automatically starting in February 2027, so most Search advertisers will meet it eventually.

What is the search terms and ad combinations report?

It is a view in the Google Ads search terms report for AI Max campaigns. It lists each search term that triggered an ad alongside the headlines, landing page, campaign and ad group that served it. Search Engine Roundtable reports it also shows whether assets were advertiser-supplied. It was first reported in an advertiser's account on 14 October 2026.

What are Google Ads channel prioritisation and budget allocation?

They are controls announced on 14 October 2026 for Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen. You mark channels high or low priority, and high-priority channels are funded first. For low-priority channels you can cap their share of the daily budget, which Google says it will respect on a best-effort basis.

Is the AI Max search terms and ad combinations report in every account?

Not confirmed. Google Ads Help documents the view and how to open it, but Google has not announced a rollout date, and the first public sighting on 14 October 2026 was in a single advertiser's account. Open the Search terms dropdown in an AI Max campaign to see whether your account has it yet.