AI Max beta - anyone got access, and does it eat your exact match traffic?

Question

Rep mentioned AI Max on the last call and the description made me uneasy. As I understand it
you turn it on for a search campaign and it starts matching queries without needing a keyword
at all, writing its own headlines and picking its own landing pages.

My immediate question is what happens to the exact match keywords I already have. If the
campaign can now match anything it considers relevant, then either my exact terms still take
priority and this only adds incremental traffic, or it is a different matching system running
alongside mine and my carefully built keyword list becomes one input among several.

Has anyone actually got this switched on? Interested in what showed up in the search terms
report afterwards more than in what the pitch says.

Greg Pallister · Answer

Not got access and not chasing it. My read of the description is the same as yours and the
part I would want answered before anything else is the landing page one...

Choosing my keywords is negotiable. Choosing which of my pages a stranger lands on is a
different order of thing, and I would want to know exactly what the opt-out looks like
before rather than after.

Jenna Krause · Answer

The measurement question is what worries me (as ever). If traffic can arrive with no
keyword attached, then every report that groups performance by keyword is now describing a
subset of the campaign rather than the campaign.

That is fine as long as everyone knows. It stops being fine the moment someone builds a
budget case on a keyword-level report and does not realise what's missing from it.

Priya Deshmukh · Answer

One client has it on. Two observations after three weeks, neither conclusive.

Volume did go up and a meaningful share of the new traffic had no keyword against it in the
report, which answers Jenna's question in the least reassuring way.

Negatives still applied, which was the thing I was most worried about. But I have not
stress-tested where they have to sit to be effective, and I would not assume an ad group
negative behaves the way it does in a normal campaign until someone has actually checked.

AI Max beta - anyone got access, and does it eat your exact match traffic?

Replies (3)

Keyword Ninja

Hi there 👋

What can we help with?

Let's get you an answer