Google Ads quietly handed you back three controls

For two years Performance Max, Google's all-in-one automated campaign, gave you almost nothing to steer with. You set a budget and a goal, handed Google your assets, and hoped. That changed. Through 2025 and into 2026 Google added back three real controls: campaign-level negative keywords, account-wide placement exclusions, and a search terms report. None were announced loudly. All matter if you spend on Google Ads. Here is what each one does.

What changed

Three things, in order of how much money they save you.

You can add negative keywords to Performance Max. Campaign-level negatives rolled out to every advertiser in January 2025, and Google later lifted the cap far past the old 100-keyword ceiling. Before this, Performance Max could spend on searches you would never choose, and you could not stop it. Now you can. (Search Engine Journal has tracked the rollout.)

You can block placements across your whole account. As of early 2026, account-level placement exclusions apply across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display and YouTube from one central list. This came after independent researchers showed Google ads turning up on junk and worse, which pushed Google to give advertisers impression-level placement data starting March 2025. (eMarketer covered the transparency push.)

You can see the search terms. Performance Max now has a search terms report. Thinner than the Search-campaign version, but it finally shows the queries you are paying for. That is the single most useful place to look when a campaign is burning budget with little to show.

A fourth change is coming whether you act or not. AI Max for Search is Google's new AI layer for Search campaigns, and it is replacing Dynamic Search Ads. The forced migration was pushed to 2027, but new Search campaigns lean on it by default. (Google's own announcement lays out the features.)

Why it matters

Automation did not go away. Google still owns your bidding, your placements and most of your targeting. What changed is that you can now see what it did and fence off the worst of it. That is the difference between a black box and a machine you supervise.

The biggest leak is brand. A long-running complaint is that Performance Max quietly spends on your own brand searches, people typing your name who would have found you anyway, then takes credit for those conversions. It makes the campaign look brilliant and hides weak prospecting. The specialists at Optmyzr studied tens of thousands of campaigns and the pattern repeats. It is the same blind spot that haunts a search powered by AI Overviews: the system answers for you and you lose sight of what it is doing.

The placement and search-term controls matter for a simpler reason. A small budget cannot afford waste. A fifth of your spend on irrelevant searches is a fifth not reaching a buyer.

Your move

Spend twenty minutes in your account and do these in order.

1. Pull the search terms report. Find queries that have nothing to do with what you sell. Every junk theme becomes a campaign-level negative keyword. Repeat monthly. A research tool like Semrush helps you spot recurring junk patterns and the buying-intent terms worth keeping.
2. Set your brand straight. Run a separate, cheap brand campaign and add a brand exclusion list to Performance Max. Now your numbers reflect real prospecting.
3. Build one account-level placement exclusion list. Block the obvious junk once, and it protects every campaign. Check the placement report after a couple of weeks.
4. Decide on AI Max deliberately. If you rely on Dynamic Search Ads, turning AI Max on yourself now means you configure the brand and URL settings. Waiting means Google flips it for you on its timeline.

The ad gets you the visit. What happens after the click decides whether the spend pays off. If a click lands on a page with no clear next step and no follow-up, the budget you just protected leaks out the other end. Lead-capture tools like GoHighLevel exist for that gap, and the principle holds with any setup: catch the lead and respond before they cool off. The same logic runs through email deliverability in 2026, where a follow-up only counts if it lands.

Worth watching

Two things to keep an eye on.

Whether Google adds budget control to match its reporting. Performance Max shows you how spend split across channels, but still will not let you set a budget per channel. Reporting without control is half a gift.

The AI Max migration. Deadlines have already slipped once, from 2026 into 2027. If you run Search campaigns, treat the migration as a when, not an if, and get familiar with the brand inclusion and exclusion settings before it is forced. Both ad platforms are drifting the same way, so it is worth reading our Meta Advantage+ briefing alongside this. For the wider shift in how people find businesses at all, our AI search hub tracks what is moving.