Dynamic Search Ads Are Going Away. Here Is the Actual Timeline.

If you manage Search campaigns, you have probably seen two conflicting dates for the end of Dynamic Search Ads. Both are real. Google moved one deadline and left the other where it was, and the gap between them is where the practical decisions sit.

The two dates

September 2026. Campaigns using automatically created assets (ACA) and the campaign-level broad match setting are auto-upgraded to AI Max, as originally planned. This did not move.

February 2027. Dynamic Search Ads sunset and auto-upgrade. This was originally September 2026 and was pushed back, announced on 11 June 2026.

So DSA survives past September. What does not survive past September is your ability to make new ones.

What that gap actually means for your account

It means the window for building a new DSA campaign closes roughly five months before the window for running one does. If you have a launch planned, a seasonal build, or a client onboarding in Q4 that you expected to start with DSA for discovery, that plan needs revisiting now rather than in January.

It also means anything scripted against the API that creates DSA campaigns stops working in September. We build our own campaign tooling on the Google Ads API, so this one is not abstract for us: any create call that assumes a dynamic ad group needs replacing before the cutoff, not after.

What the upgrade does to your settings

Google's stated position is that the transition preserves what you had. In their wording, "AI Max will be enabled with settings configured to mirror your legacy setup once the auto-upgrades are complete."

Concretely: dynamic ad groups become standard ad groups, and all three AI Max features switch on with "your legacy URL controls preserved." For accounts that were only using ACA, search term matching and text customisation activate automatically. For accounts using campaign-level broad match, search term matching enables by default.

Read that last line twice if you run lead generation. Search term matching switching on by default is a targeting expansion arriving without you asking for it.

The controls you get in exchange

AI Max is out of beta and does carry controls that DSA did not: brand restrictions, location restrictions, and text guidelines. If you have ever wanted to stop a dynamic campaign from writing headlines around a competitor's brand name, that control now exists. This is a genuine improvement and the main argument for moving early rather than being moved.

About the 7% figure

Google states that "AI Max for Search campaigns see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS when using the full feature suite."

Two things worth holding in mind. It is an average across advertisers, which tells you nothing about your account. And it is conditional on using the full feature suite, which is exactly the configuration that gives you the least control. A vendor's own aggregate uplift number is a reason to test, not a reason to skip testing.

What we would do

• Audit now, before September. List every campaign using DSA, ACA, or campaign-level broad match. These are three separate exposures on two separate timelines and most accounts do not know which ones they have.
• Migrate the ACA and broad match campaigns yourself rather than letting September do it. You keep control of the configuration, and you get to observe the change against a known baseline instead of a moving one.
• Set brand restrictions before search term matching turns on, not after you find the query report full of competitor terms.
• Keep DSA campaigns running if they perform. You have until February 2027. Just do not plan anything new around them.
• Fix your API tooling in August, not September. A create call that fails silently in an automated pipeline is worse than one that fails loudly.

The honest caveat

We have not yet run AI Max at scale across a large book of client accounts, and anyone telling you in September 2026 that they have years of AI Max results is telling you something that cannot be true. What we can tell you is what the announcements say, what the dates are, and where the traps are in the migration. When we have our own numbers, we will publish them here with the accounts and the caveats attached.

Sources

• Google Ads & Commerce Blog, "Google's Dynamic Search Ads are upgrading to AI Max" - timeline extension announced 11 June 2026
• Google Ads Help, New features & announcements
• All figures and quotations read on 18 September 2026