For three years, the default Google Ads campaign for most accounts has been Performance Max. Single campaign, all inventory, AI optimization, set it and let it run.
In early 2026, Google launched AI Max more broadly. By April, the category has quietly shifted. Performance Max is still the right answer for some accounts. AI Max is the better default for most.
If you're running paid acquisition and you haven't reviewed your campaign types since AI Max went generally available, you're probably overpaying.
What changed
Performance Max was Google's bet on full automation. You give it conversion goals and creative assets, it figures out where to show ads across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. The trade-off was control: you couldn't see search-term reports, couldn't separate channel performance, couldn't cleanly steer the campaign.
AI Max is a campaign-level setting on Search campaigns. It expands keyword matching with AI, automates ad creation, and uses Google's models to find queries you wouldn't have targeted explicitly. But it preserves search-term visibility, channel separation, and the ability to add negative keywords.
In other words: AI Max gives you most of Performance Max's lift on Search, with the controls operators actually need to optimize.
When to pick which
AI Max is the new default for:
- Accounts where Search drives most of the conversions (SaaS, B2B, services).
- Teams with a marketer who wants visibility into what's actually being matched.
- Campaigns that need negative-keyword steering to avoid waste.
- Anyone who got burned by Performance Max's lack of transparency in 2024 to 2025.
Performance Max is still right for:
- E-commerce with a Merchant Center feed and a conversion volume above ~30 a week, where the cross-inventory benefit is real.
- Brands that genuinely benefit from YouTube + Display + Search bundled.
- Accounts where the team doesn't have the bandwidth to manage Search separately.
Run both when you have the budget and conversion volume. Performance Max for product-feed-driven shopping inventory, AI Max Search for non-shopping queries. They cover different intent shapes.
What most teams are getting wrong
Two patterns we've seen since AI Max launched:
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Teams left Performance Max running on Search-only goals. Performance Max was a compromise when there was no AI-augmented Search alternative. Now there is. If your conversions are mostly search-driven, AI Max gets you better data and cleaner steering.
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Teams enabled AI Max but didn't add negative keywords. AI Max's whole pitch is "we'll match queries you didn't think of." That's exactly why you need negative keywords for the queries you don't want. The default settings will burn money on irrelevant matches if you don't constrain them.
The accounts we've seen do best with AI Max are the ones that treat it as a Search campaign with extra reach, not as autopilot.
What this changes about briefing campaigns
The other thing AI Max shifts: how much of the work moves upstream into the brief.
When the platform can match more queries, write its own headlines, and reach more inventory, the leverage shifts to the inputs. Audience definition, intent mapping, creative angles. If those are sharp, AI Max amplifies them. If those are fuzzy, AI Max amplifies the fuzziness.
We've been building KaiNet around this shift. The platforms got better at execution. The bottleneck moved to the brief. Generating a campaign that AI Max or Performance Max will actually run well takes about an hour of strategy work that most teams don't do because they're busy fighting the platform UI. We automate that strategy work end-to-end and hand the human the brief to approve before anything ships.
The 2024 playbook was "set up Performance Max and let it learn." The 2026 playbook is "brief AI Max correctly the first time." Which is harder, but the upside is larger.
If you've been running Performance Max on autopilot, the next 30 minutes of your week is worth spending on this question: does this account belong on AI Max now? For most readers, the answer is yes.
KaiNet · Campaign patterns