Google Ads in 2026: AI Max Goes Live, Power Pack Replaces Power Pair

What changed in Google Ads between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026

The platform you learned last year is not the platform you are running campaigns on today. Between January and March 2026 alone, Google introduced AI voice-over automation in Performance Max, revised how budgets are paced for scheduled campaigns, expanded AI-driven creative controls, updated the Google Ads Editor, and announced the end of call-only ads.

This is not an incremental update cycle. Google Ads in 2026 is a story about how the advertising system is becoming more AI-assisted, more context-aware, and more dependent on the quality of the signals advertisers send into the platform. The advertiser's role is changing: less time building keyword lists, more time governing AI outputs, feeding first-party data, and strengthening the content that Google's systems pull from.

AI Max is a Search campaign enhancement framework that brings together broad match, responsive search ads, smart bidding, and automatically created assets - designed to help find more relevant queries, tailor ad copy in real time, and send users to the most relevant page on a website. Google - paraphrased from Google Ads product communications

AI Max for Search: keywords become optional

AI Max is the single most important feature to understand this year. It collapses broad match, responsive search ads, smart bidding, and automatically created assets into a unified Search framework. By January 2026, every Ads MCC in North America had the option to run keyword-free Search campaigns. The interface asks for a landing page, a daily budget, and a ROAS or CPA goal.

That does not mean you should flip it on blindly. The best use of AI Max is controlled expansion. Brand settings, URL exclusions, and location-of-interest controls are your guardrails - use them. One practitioner's rule of thumb is worth noting: use AI Max when you have 300+ SKUs, a clean feed, and willingness to give 30-40% of total spend to the machine. Otherwise, a hybrid approach combining AI Max capabilities with manual control tends to produce better results.

The Power Pack architecture

At Google Marketing Live in May 2025, Google introduced the Power Pack, replacing the old Power Pair with three campaign types working in concert: Demand Gen creates awareness and interest, AI Max engages users on Search to capture and convert their intent, and Performance Max orchestrates full-funnel performance at scale. Whether this three-part system delivers superior results in every account is still being tested, but Google's product investments, feature decisions, and algorithmic preferences will be built around this architecture going forward.

Ads inside AI: Overviews, AI Mode, and UCP

Ads are now eligible to show above, below, or within AI Overviews in Search. Google AI Mode has reached 75 million daily users, with ads appearing in roughly a quarter of AI Overview results. On February 11, 2026, Google introduced a shopping ad format in AI Mode, alongside Direct Offers - a monetization experience that lets businesses share a tailored offer with a shopper ready to buy, without changing what they offer everyone else.

The biggest structural shift for ecommerce advertisers is the Universal Commerce Protocol. UCP is an open-source standard for agentic commerce, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, endorsed by 20+ global partners. UCP-powered checkout is rolling out now, letting US shoppers buy items from Etsy and Wayfair directly inside AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, with Shopify, Target, and Walmart coming. If you participate, your products become eligible for agentic AI purchases - but you lose the site visit, the cross-sell, and the email capture. If you opt out, you risk becoming invisible as the AI itself becomes the marketplace.

Performance Max grows up

PMax has matured. Channel-level reporting now extends to all campaigns, showing clicks, conversions, conversion value, and cost broken down by YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, Maps, and soon search partners. Campaign-level negative keywords are available to all advertisers. Asset group-level reporting shows which audience signal or product group drove the conversion. Brand exclusions let you push brand terms back to Standard Shopping or Search campaigns. New betas for age-based demographic exclusions and device-level targeting customization give advertisers finer control.

Deprecations on a fixed clock

Call-only ads are being retired. In February 2026, all options to create new call-only ads were removed. In February 2027, all existing call-only ads will stop receiving impressions. The replacement is responsive search ads with call assets - not just a format swap, but a move into Google's broader AI-assisted ad system with more message variation and asset combinations.

Dynamic Search Ads are not officially deprecated yet, but the writing is on the wall. AI Max and DSA overlap significantly, and Google appears to be consolidating around AI Max as the primary keywordless targeting solution.

Effective dates and rollout windows

Multiple Google Ads changes are on overlapping timelines. The dates below summarize what's already live, what's mid-rollout, and what has a firm retirement clock.

• Power Pack architecture announced: Google Marketing Live, May 2025
• AI Max for Search GA: every Ads MCC in North America has the option by January 2026
• Ads in AI Overviews: rolling out by geography, language, eligibility, campaign type, intent, and ad relevance
• Shopping ads in AI Mode: launched February 11, 2026 with Direct Offers monetization experience
• UCP-powered checkout: rolling out now for Etsy and Wayfair in the US; Shopify, Target, Walmart coming
• Performance Max transparency suite: channel-level reporting, campaign-level negatives, asset group reporting all live
• Call-only ads: new creation removed: February 2026
• Call-only ads: impressions stop: February 2027
• Meridian Scenario Planner expansion: February 2026
• Privacy Sandbox cookie pivot: Chrome continues to offer user choice on third-party cookies through existing privacy settings (no immediate standalone deprecation)

Who's affected and how much

Every Google Ads account is touched by at least one of these changes. The severity depends on what campaign types you run and how dependent your revenue is on phone calls, product feeds, or precise targeting.

Two caveats. First, the privacy story is more nuanced than coverage suggests - Chrome did not fully deprecate third-party cookies; it now offers user choice. But Safari and Firefox already block by default, and ad blockers cover roughly 30% of internet users, so the conversion data gap (50-70% capture in many accounts) is real regardless. Second, AI Max final URL expansion routes traffic to the most relevant page on your site, which means site architecture and content quality now feed into paid search performance more directly than before.

What to do this week

Priority order: stabilize measurement first (Enhanced Conversions), then address the fixed-clock deprecations (call-only), then retest the matured surfaces (PMax transparency), then plan controlled AI Max experiments.

1. Implement Enhanced Conversions if you haven't. Enhanced Conversions supplements your existing tracking by sending hashed first-party conversion data from your website tags or imported offline events to Google in a privacy-safe way. Advertisers typically see a 5-15% increase in reported conversions, which improves Smart Bidding accuracy because the algorithm optimizes toward a more complete picture. Everything else - AI Max, PMax, Smart Bidding - performs better when the underlying data is accurate. If you don't have this live, stop reading and do it first.
2. Migrate call-only ads to RSAs with call assets. The clock is fixed: new creation blocked February 2026, impressions stop February 2027. Don't wait until Q4. Test RSAs with call assets alongside your existing call-only campaigns while both formats are still running. Measure lead quality, not just call volume - the new format reaches a wider audience but the intent distribution may differ.
3. Audit PMax with the new transparency tools. Open channel-level reporting on your existing PMax campaigns. Find out where your conversions are actually coming from (YouTube vs Display vs Search vs Gmail vs Maps). Add campaign-level negative keywords - simple terms like "free" and "used" routinely save 10-20% of wasted spend in ecommerce accounts. Review asset group reporting to identify which audience signal or product group is driving the most conversions, and push budget toward what's working.
4. Score AI Max readiness for your accounts. The rule of thumb: AI Max suits accounts with 300+ SKUs, a clean product feed, and willingness to give 30-40% of total spend to the machine. If you do not meet those criteria, a hybrid approach (AI Max enhancements layered on top of manual Search structure) is the safer near-term play. For accounts that qualify, plan a controlled pilot in one campaign with clear guardrails - brand settings, URL exclusions, location-of-interest controls.
5. Audit your product feed and landing pages. AI Max's final URL expansion lets Google route traffic to the most relevant page on your site - which means thin landing pages, duplicative content, and unclear offers now starve the AI of the raw material it needs. Pair this with UCP-readiness: a messy feed in 2026 may not qualify for the agentic-commerce auction at all, not just spend inefficiently. Treat feed and site quality as a paid search performance lever, not just an SEO concern.

What to do this quarter

The strategic shift, in one line: the advertiser's role is moving from keyword curation to signal governance. AI Max, PMax, and Demand Gen all perform better with better signals - first-party data, clean feeds, strong landing content, defined brand guardrails - and the accounts that invest in those upstream layers in Q1/Q2 2026 will pull away from accounts that keep optimizing keyword lists.

Plan a controlled AI Max pilot

Pick one campaign or product category where AI Max is a fit (300+ SKUs, clean feed, room to give 30-40% of spend to the machine). Set guardrails before you turn it on: brand settings to govern brand-term routing, URL exclusions to keep traffic off pages that should not receive paid clicks, location-of-interest controls if geographic accuracy matters. Plan a 60-90 day evaluation window with clear success criteria - ROAS or CPA against the pre-AI Max baseline, plus a qualitative check on which queries AI Max surfaced.

Build a UCP participation decision

If you sell on Shopify, Target, or Walmart - or if Etsy and Wayfair are channels you care about - decide explicitly whether to participate in UCP-powered checkout. The trade-off is real: agentic AI purchase eligibility vs the site visit, the cross-sell, and the email capture. Either decision is defensible; refusing to decide is not. The accounts that drift into invisibility in 2026 will be the ones that never built a UCP point of view.

Evaluate Meridian for cross-channel measurement

For advertisers spending $1M+/year across channels, Meridian (Google's open-source MMM) plus the February 2026 Scenario Planner expansion offers a credible no-code interface to test budget scenarios and view projected ROI outcomes in real time. Meridian now supports non-media variables like pricing and promotions, plus channel-level contribution priors that let you encode business knowledge into the model. Pilot it alongside any existing MMM, especially if your current MMM was built for offline media and brand work.

What we're seeing in real accounts

Note: the patterns below are aggregated from Google Ads audits we've run across ecommerce, lead gen, and local services accounts in 2025-2026. The dominant finding: most accounts have not yet acted on the PMax transparency updates, which is leaving meaningful optimization on the table.

Counter-pattern worth flagging: on accounts that flipped AI Max on without guardrails, we have seen brand-term cannibalization (AI Max bidding on brand queries that should sit in a dedicated Brand campaign) and final-URL expansion routing traffic to thin pages that converted worse than the original landing page. Both are governance problems, not AI problems - brand settings, URL exclusions, and a clean site fix them. The advertisers struggling with AI Max are almost always advertisers who have not invested in the signals it depends on.

What we're still watching

Five open questions are driving how we sequence Google Ads audit work for the next two quarters.

• DSA deprecation timing: Whether and when Google formally announces the end of Dynamic Search Ads in favor of AI Max. The overlap is clear and the direction is obvious, but the official date drives migration urgency for accounts still relying on DSA at scale.
• AI Mode share growth: Whether AI Mode's 75 million daily users keeps climbing at its current rate, and whether the 25.5% ad presence in AI Overviews expands to traditional results too. The share trajectory determines how quickly creative needs to shift toward conversational, intent-driven formats.
• UCP participation incentives: Whether Google introduces ranking or auction advantages for UCP-participating sellers vs non-participants. If UCP eligibility becomes a Quality Score factor in agentic surfaces, the opt-out calculus changes materially.
• Privacy Sandbox endgame: Whether Chrome's user-choice model holds, or whether regulatory pressure forces a stricter default. Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default; the gap between actual and tracked conversions is widening regardless, and accounts that haven't moved to Enhanced Conversions plus offline conversion imports will see Smart Bidding accuracy degrade.
• Brand-safety controls in AI text: How robust Google's brand-guideline guardrails become for AI-generated ad copy. Current controls let you flag off-limits phrases and prevent certain implications, but the level of granularity and enforcement quality is still maturing. Accounts in regulated categories (finance, health, legal) should test the controls aggressively before going hands-off.