Which campaigns are eligible to serve inside AI Mode

Ads inside AI Mode do not come from a new campaign type. They come from campaigns you probably already run, but only if those campaigns are set up a specific way. Four configurations qualify: Performance Max, AI Max with search term matching switched on, Shopping, and Search campaigns using broad match.

Everything else in your account is sitting this one out. If your Search campaigns run exact and phrase only, which is still how a lot of well-managed accounts are built, they are not eligible.

Why broad match is the entry ticket

AI Mode does not run one query. It runs query fan-out, where a single user question spawns several concurrent related searches behind the scenes. Someone asking about the best way to seal a leaking basement in a 1970s brick building generates a spread of narrower searches about waterproofing methods, materials, cost and contractors.

An exact match keyword cannot participate in that, because there is no single query to match. Broad match and AI Max search term matching can, because both are designed to match on meaning rather than string.

This is the part most teams have not connected. The eligibility rule is not really about ad formats. It is about whether your campaign has a matching system that can operate without a literal query.

One question, several auctions

Fan-out means one user session can put you in multiple auctions. That has three consequences worth planning around.

Your search terms report gets stranger. You will see terms no human would type, because they were generated in the fan-out rather than entered by a user. Resist the reflex to negative them all out. Google's own guidance for AI Max is to use negative keywords sparingly, precisely because aggressive negatives cut off the matched traffic you turned the feature on for.

Frequency is not obvious. The same person can see you more than once inside a single answer session. Standard frequency reporting was not built for that.

Intent sits deeper. The searches generated in a fan-out are usually narrower than the question the person asked. A broad question fans out into specific ones. So the traffic that reaches your site is often further down the funnel than the raw query suggests, and your landing page needs to answer the specific version, not the general one.

Reporting, honestly

You cannot cleanly isolate AI Mode performance today. There is no reliable way to split it out from the rest of your Search or PMax delivery, run a holdout, and tell your board what it earned. Anyone presenting an AI Mode return figure is estimating.

That is an argument for measuring at the campaign level and using an incrementality approach rather than chasing a surface-level breakdown that does not exist yet. Geo-based holdouts still work. So does the boring method of turning something off in a matched region for four weeks and reading the difference in total enquiries.

The realistic setup

If you want in, here is the order.

1. 1.Turn on one AI Max campaign, not five. Use a campaign with enough conversion volume that the bidder is not starting from nothing.
2. 2.Review the AI Max search term and landing page reports fortnightly. AI Max reporting separates search terms, search terms with landing pages, and the older dynamic-ads equivalents, so you can see what the matching layer actually did.
3. 3.Trim negatives with a scalpel. Brand safety terms and genuinely irrelevant categories, yes. Anything you simply have not seen before, no.
4. 4.Check final URL expansion against your site. If expansion is on, Google can send traffic to any indexable page. A thin page you forgot about becomes an ad destination.
5. 5.Watch your landing page reports as closely as your keyword reports. In a fan-out world, page coverage is targeting.

The deadline nobody is watching

The dates matter more than the feature. Google begins auto-upgrading campaigns to AI Max in September 2026 if they use Automatically Created Assets or the campaign-level broad match setting, and new dynamic search ad campaigns stop being creatable at the same point. Remaining dynamic search ad campaigns get force-migrated in February 2027.

Most teams have the February 2027 date in their calendar and not the September 2026 one. If your account uses Automatically Created Assets, and a lot do because it was on by default in many builds, you are on the earlier list whether or not you have ever run a dynamic search ad.

Check that setting today, because the difference between choosing this and having it happen to you is about four months of learning.