Google's Push Towards AI Advertising, and What It Means for Your Business.
Over the past couple of years, almost every recommendation inside Google Ads has started pointing the same way: give Google’s AI more control over your campaigns. Performance Max, AI Max for Search, broad match keywords, automated bidding and automatically applied recommendations are all part of the same push.
The promise is less manual work, smarter optimisation and better results. In my experience, the reality has been mixed. Some of these tools are useful in the right circumstances. But I’ve also seen automation pull campaigns away from what the business actually needed. Instead of more enquiries, it delivered more traffic. Instead of better leads, it widened the targeting until the budget was reaching people who were never going to become customers.
What concerns me most is how gradually the control gets handed over. Google presents its recommendations as best practice, and the optimisation score can make it feel like you’re doing something wrong if you don’t follow them. But an optimisation score and a successful campaign are not the same thing.
The businesses I work with don’t want clicks for the sake of clicks. They want phone calls, enquiries, bookings and sales, and that’s the test I apply to every AI advertising tool.
Google’s AI tools can help a well-built campaign, but they’re designed to increase activity, and activity isn’t the same as enquiries. Keep control of where your budget goes, treat recommendations as suggestions, ignore the optimisation score as a measure of success, and judge every change by the leads and sales it produces.
The push towards automation is speeding up.
This isn’t only a Google trend. Meta has been doing the same with Advantage+, and both platforms are steadily moving decisions away from advertisers and into their own systems.
Google’s shift is gathering pace. From September 2026, Google began automatically upgrading many Search campaigns to AI Max, including those using Dynamic Search Ads or campaign-level broad match. AI Max can match your ads to searches beyond the keywords you’ve chosen, which I cover in more detail in why more keywords don’t always mean more customers.
Every decision you hand over makes it a little harder to see where your budget is going and why. For large advertisers with in-house marketing teams, that may be an acceptable trade. For most small and medium businesses, every advertising dollar matters, and knowing where it goes matters just as much.
What advertisers have learned from Meta's AI tools.
Meta’s Advantage+ is one of the most talked-about examples of AI-driven advertising. It promised better targeting, better efficiency and stronger results, and some businesses have done well with it.
Plenty of advertisers have had a different experience. Agencies interviewed by Marketing Brew in April 2026 described AI features being switched on in their accounts without warning, and budgets drifting towards lower-quality placements and audiences that rarely engaged. One described having to keep checking for new automated features Meta had turned on without telling them.
The common thread isn’t bad technology. It’s a loss of control. The platform starts making decisions that used to belong to the advertiser, and platforms are built to optimise for their own performance metrics. They don’t share the priorities of the business owner paying the bill.
Performance Max chases activity unless you steer it.
Google’s version is less obvious, but the challenge is similar.
Performance Max is Google’s flagship automated campaign type. Instead of running Search, Display, YouTube and other placements as separate campaigns, it combines them into one and lets Google’s AI decide where your ads appear.
The promise is broader reach. What I often see is a system optimising for activity: more impressions, more clicks, more traffic. None of that automatically turns into more enquiries.
I recently reviewed a local service business account where a Performance Max campaign was drawing traffic from people interested in pet products and online shopping. Neither had anything to do with the services being advertised. On the surface the campaign looked healthy. Clicks were coming in and the budget was being spent. Most of that traffic was never going to become a customer.
We replaced it with a tightly controlled Search campaign built around relevant keywords and clear buying intent, and enquiries improved significantly within a few weeks.
That wasn’t because automation is bad. It was because relevance matters more than volume.
To be fair to Google, it has added more controls over the past year, including campaign-level negative keywords and search terms reporting for Performance Max. If you do run Performance Max, use them. A campaign that nobody is checking is where the budget leaks happen.
Your optimisation score isn't a performance score.
The optimisation score is one of the most misunderstood numbers in Google Ads. Google shows it prominently, and many advertisers assume a higher score means a better campaign.
It doesn’t. According to Google’s own explanation, the score is calculated from your account settings and the recommendations currently available. Applying a recommendation raises it, and so does dismissing one. That alone tells you it measures how you’ve responded to Google’s suggestions, not how well your ads are bringing in customers.
Those suggestions typically include raising your budget, adding more keywords, switching to broad match, turning on AI Max, launching Performance Max and enabling more automation. Some will suit your account. Many won’t.
A lower score doesn’t mean your campaign is underperforming. It means you haven’t adopted everything Google suggested. I’ve seen very successful campaigns running with modest optimisation scores, because the recommendations being ignored didn’t fit the client’s goals.
The score also isn’t part of Quality Score, and it doesn’t decide whether your ads show. So I encourage businesses to stop chasing it and watch their enquiries, leads and sales instead.
Automation can't fix a budget that's too small.
Automation can also hide a more basic problem: a budget that isn’t realistic for the market.
In a competitive industry, a small daily budget disappears quickly. When an automated campaign has limited money to work with, it often spreads that money thinly across placements and audiences while it searches for opportunities. The result looks busy but doesn’t produce much.
Visibility matters in service industries because customers rarely click once and buy. They research, compare providers, come back to websites and take their time deciding. A campaign needs enough budget to keep showing up throughout that process.
In several accounts I’ve reviewed, the fix wasn’t more automation. It was giving the campaign enough budget to compete while keeping it focused on relevant searches. A well-structured campaign with a realistic budget will almost always beat a poorly structured one with every automated feature switched on.
How I approach automation instead.
If you’re managing your own Google Ads account, these are the principles I’d follow.
Start with search intent. People actively searching for what you offer are usually worth far more than broad audiences an AI system thinks might be interested. Build your campaigns around those searches first.
Use automation to support your strategy, not replace it. Smart Bidding, for example, can work well once a campaign has clean conversion tracking and enough data. The key word is support. Automation should help your decisions, not make all of them.
Treat recommendations as suggestions. Some are helpful. Some aren’t. Understand what each one will change before you accept it.
Turn off auto-apply. Many business owners don’t realise Google can apply certain recommendations to their account automatically. Check the auto-apply settings in the Recommendations section. I prefer to review every change before it goes live.
Measure outcomes, not activity. Clicks, impressions and optimisation scores have their place, but enquiries, phone calls, bookings and sales are what tell you whether a campaign is working.
Before you accept a Google Ads recommendation, ask:
- Will this bring more enquiries, or just more traffic?
- Will I still be able to see where the budget is going?
- Does it fit my budget, or does it assume I’ll spend more?
- Does it target the customers I want, or a broader audience?
- Can I easily undo it if results drop?
Automation works best with someone steering.
Google and Meta are both moving towards more automation, and that isn’t going to reverse. AI will keep playing a bigger role in digital advertising, and there will be areas where it delivers real improvements.
The businesses getting the best results aren’t the ones handing over complete control. They’re the ones that understand their customers, know what a good lead looks like and make sure automation serves those goals rather than replacing them.
Anyone can launch a Google Ads campaign and get clicks. The challenge is getting the right clicks. That comes from understanding search intent, choosing relevant keywords, structuring campaigns properly and making sure the budget goes where it can produce real results.
If you’re not sure whether your Google Ads campaign is working as well as it could, or you’d like a second opinion on where your budget is going, we’re happy to take a look. At Central Coast Websites, we build campaigns around business outcomes, not platform recommendations. Find out more about our Google Ads management, or get in touch to talk it through.
