Dynamic Search Ads Are Being Retired: What the AI Max Migration Actually Changes

If you still have a Dynamic Search Ads campaign running, you’ve probably already seen a notice about it in your account. Maybe you clicked past it, the way you click past most of Google’s in-product banners. This one is worth reading, because it’s the start of a process that ends with your DSA campaigns being rewritten into something else whether you plan for it or not.

Google announced in September 2026 that Dynamic Search Ads is being phased out and replaced by AI Max for Search. New DSA campaigns can no longer be created through the Google Ads interface, Google Ads Editor, or the API. The campaigns already running will keep working for a while longer, but the end point is fixed: automatic migration to AI Max starts in February 2027, and after that DSA ad groups can’t be created at all. This piece walks through what’s actually changing, why Google is doing it now, what breaks if you do nothing, and what to check before your account gets moved for you.

What Dynamic Search Ads actually did

Before getting into the migration, it’s worth being precise about what DSA was, because a lot of the confusion around this change comes from people conflating it with broad match or with Performance Max. It’s neither.

Dynamic Search Ads worked by having Google crawl your website (or a page feed you supplied) and match incoming search queries to your pages directly, without you writing keywords. Instead of bidding on “waterproof hiking boots size 11,” you’d tell Google “here’s my site, here’s my page feed, go match queries to the most relevant landing page.” Google would then generate a dynamic headline pulled from the page content and a dynamic display URL, while you supplied the description lines and set the bid.

This was genuinely useful for two situations: large catalog sites where building keyword lists for every SKU or category page was impractical, and as a safety net to catch long-tail queries that a keyword-based campaign structure would never anticipate. A lot of ecommerce accounts and content-heavy B2B sites leaned on DSA precisely because of that reach.

The mechanism was campaign-level. DSA lived as a distinct campaign type, or as dynamic ad groups sitting inside a broader Search campaign, running parallel to your keyword-targeted ad groups. That architecture — a separate lane for dynamic matching — is exactly what’s going away.

What’s replacing it, and why the timing matters

AI Max for Search moved out of beta this year and is now positioned as the default way to add automated reach to a Search campaign, rather than a separate campaign type sitting next to your regular one. It layers three specific features on top of an existing Search campaign:

• Search term matching, which expands beyond your keyword list using your keywords, ads, landing pages, and signals about user intent to catch queries you haven’t explicitly targeted — functionally the successor to what DSA’s query-to-page matching did, but running inside your normal campaign structure instead of a separate one.
• Text customization, which generates additional headline and description variations pulled from your website copy and existing ad assets, tailored to the specific query. This is the replacement for DSA’s auto-generated headlines, except it draws from a wider pool of source material than just the crawled page.
• Final URL expansion, which can route a click to any relevant page on your domain rather than the single final URL you set on the ad, subject to whatever URL exclusions you configure. This is the direct descendant of DSA’s dynamic page targeting.

So the capability isn’t disappearing. What’s disappearing is the separate campaign structure DSA used to deliver it. Google’s reasoning, based on their own announcement, is that running two parallel systems — keyword-targeted Search campaigns and dynamically-matched DSA campaigns — creates a fragmented view of Search performance and duplicated management overhead, and that folding dynamic matching into every Search campaign as a layered feature is simpler for advertisers and easier for Google to keep improving. Whether you find that convincing or find it a way to expand automated matching into accounts that didn’t opt into it is a fair debate, but it doesn’t change what you need to do about it.

The timing itself has already shifted once. Google originally set September 2026 as the start of automatic DSA migration, matching the timeline for campaign-level broad match and Automatically Created Assets, which auto-upgraded on that original schedule. DSA got a reprieve. Google pushed the automatic migration back to February 2027, citing the need to avoid disrupting accounts during Q4 peak season and to give advertisers more runway to test AI Max controls before it’s forced on them. That’s a meaningfully different situation than the broad match and ACA changes, which already happened this quarter — so if you conflated the two, it’s worth re-checking which of your campaigns are actually on which clock.

The actual dates

Here’s the sequence as Google has laid it out:

• September 2026 — New DSA campaigns and dynamic ad groups can no longer be created in the Google Ads UI, Google Ads Editor, or the API. Existing DSA campaigns keep running. In-account notices start appearing, encouraging a voluntary upgrade to AI Max.
• January 15, 2027 — Reminder notifications go out to any account still running legacy Dynamic Search Ads, flagging that automatic migration is imminent.
• February 2027 — Automatic migration begins and rolls out across the month, account by account. Once a campaign is migrated, its dynamic ad groups become standard ad groups with AI Max features switched on, and creating new DSA ad groups is no longer possible in that account at all.

What ports over automatically: campaign and ad group settings, spend history, and performance data. Google says legacy URL controls — the include/exclude rules you had governing which pages DSA could target — are preserved as URL exclusion rules inside AI Max, so you’re not starting from zero on targeting restrictions. What you lose is the separate campaign-level view of “this is my dynamic matching performance” versus “this is my keyword performance,” because after migration it’s all inside the same Search campaign, and dynamic matches show up in the same search terms report as everything else, distinguished by match type and source rather than by campaign.

Why this isn’t the same as the broad match auto-upgrade

It’s easy to lump this in with the campaign-level broad match and Automatically Created Assets changes that already rolled out, since both feed into the same AI Max destination. But they’re different mechanisms with different risk profiles, and treating them the same is how accounts end up with gaps.

AI Max for Search campaigns generally is additive — it’s a set of controls you can turn on for an existing keyword campaign, and you retain your keyword list and match types underneath it. The broad match/ACA migration took campaigns that were already running loosely-targeted broad match with automatically created assets and folded them into AI Max’s controls, which for most accounts was a relatively contained change because the targeting was already broad.

DSA migration is structurally bigger, because it’s converting an entire campaign type — one that had no keyword list at all, that relied entirely on crawled page content and page feed logic — into ad groups governed by AI Max’s URL expansion and search term matching. If your DSA campaign had carefully scoped page feeds, category-level URL inclusions, and a long negative keyword list built up over years to keep it from wasting spend on irrelevant queries, none of that structure exists in the destination format in the same way. It gets translated as best Google can, but “translated” and “identical” aren’t the same thing, and the accounts that get burned by this kind of migration are usually the ones that assumed they would be.

What actually breaks if you don’t prepare

Nothing breaks instantly. That’s part of why this is easy to ignore — the notices show up, nothing visibly changes for months, and it’s tempting to defer dealing with it until the forced migration hits in February. Here’s what tends to go wrong when accounts do that:

Negative keyword coverage gets thinner than you think. A DSA campaign’s negative keyword list was built specifically to keep the crawler-based matching from firing on queries that technically matched page content but weren’t commercial intent — informational searches, competitor research, job-seeker queries, and so on. When that campaign becomes a standard ad group under AI Max, your negatives carry over, but the matching logic they were tuned against has changed. A negative list built for “keep DSA’s crawl-matching in check” is not automatically well-calibrated for “keep AI Max’s search term matching and final URL expansion in check” — the failure modes are related but not identical, and reviewing your negative list against the new mechanism rather than assuming it still fits is the single highest-leverage thing you can do before migration.

Page feed exclusions don’t map one-to-one. If your DSA setup relied on a page feed with specific URL rules — include this category, exclude that discontinued product range, exclude the returns policy page — those rules were doing real work keeping the campaign scoped. AI Max’s URL exclusion controls are the nearest equivalent, but they’re not configured automatically from your old page feed logic in every case; you may need to rebuild the exclusion list by hand after migration to get back to the same scope you had.

Reporting continuity breaks at the campaign level. If you’ve been reporting “DSA campaign performance” as its own line item to a client or to leadership, that line disappears after migration — the traffic and conversions get absorbed into whatever Search campaign it merged with, distinguished only by match type in the search term report. If you don’t flag this ahead of time, the first person to notice is usually whoever pulls the monthly report and asks where a chunk of conversions went.

You lose your pre-migration baseline if you don’t capture it first. Once a campaign is migrated, comparing “before” and “after” performance gets harder, because the campaign structure itself changed at the same time performance might shift for other reasons — seasonality, competitive pressure, unrelated account changes. Without a clean snapshot taken before migration, you can’t cleanly attribute a performance change to the migration itself versus everything else happening in the account that week.

Who this actually affects

Not every account has exposure here, so it’s worth being clear about who needs to act and who can mostly ignore this beyond a quick check. If you’ve never run a standalone Dynamic Search Ads campaign or turned on dynamic ad groups inside a Search campaign, none of the migration mechanics apply to you directly — your account won’t have anything auto-converted in February 2027 because there’s nothing to convert. Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen, and App campaigns are unaffected; this change is scoped specifically to the DSA campaign type and dynamic ad groups within Search campaigns, not to Google’s broader automation push generally.

The accounts with real exposure tend to fall into a few recognizable patterns. Large ecommerce catalogs that leaned on DSA to cover thousands of product pages without building keyword lists for each one are probably the biggest group, because the page feed logic those accounts built up over time is exactly what doesn’t translate cleanly. Content-heavy B2B and SaaS sites that used DSA as a long-tail catch-all alongside a smaller core keyword campaign are another common pattern — often these accounts have a DSA campaign that quietly drives a meaningful share of conversions despite getting little day-to-day attention, which makes it easy to overlook until the migration notice shows up. Agencies managing dozens of client accounts are in a different position: the individual exposure per account might be small, but the aggregate work of auditing every account for DSA usage, and the risk of a February pileup hitting several clients in the same week, makes it worth building a standard audit process now rather than handling each account reactively as notices arrive.

If you’re not sure which category you’re in, the fastest check is to filter your campaigns view by campaign type for “Dynamic Search Ads,” and separately check any Search campaigns for dynamic ad groups nested inside them — the two aren’t always in the same place in the interface, and it’s easy to check one and assume you’ve covered both. If a campaign has already been converted without you noticing, the change history report will show exactly when Google made the switch, which is useful for lining up the date against any performance shift you’re trying to explain.

Tracking and reporting details worth checking

Beyond negative keywords and URL exclusions, there’s a quieter risk around tracking. If your DSA campaigns used ValueTrack parameters or a tracking template tied to the dynamic page targeting, it’s worth confirming those still populate correctly once the ad group is running under AI Max’s final URL expansion rather than DSA’s original matching. The mechanism selecting the destination URL has changed, and while Google’s stated intent is that legacy URL controls carry over as exclusions, the actual URL a given click lands on can differ from what your DSA setup would have chosen for the same query. If your analytics or CRM segmentation depends on specific URL patterns or parameters to categorize traffic correctly, spot-check a sample of post-migration landing pages against what the same queries would have resolved to under DSA, rather than assuming the mapping held.

AI Max’s reporting also separates “Final URL” from “Final URL source” in a way DSA’s reporting didn’t need to, precisely because expansion means the two can differ — the source is the URL you originally set, and the final URL is what actually served after expansion. That’s a genuinely useful signal once you know to look for it, but it’s a new column in a report you may not have needed to check closely before, so it’s worth building the habit of glancing at it rather than assuming your original URL is still what’s serving.

Common questions

Will this affect my Performance Max or Shopping campaigns? No. This change is specific to the Dynamic Search Ads campaign type and to dynamic ad groups inside Search campaigns. Performance Max, standard Shopping, Demand Gen, and App campaigns run on entirely separate mechanics and aren’t part of this migration.

Can I just turn off AI Max instead of migrating? On a Search campaign where you’ve voluntarily enabled AI Max features, yes — you can toggle search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion off individually at the campaign level. That control doesn’t apply to legacy DSA campaigns on the forced migration path, though; those convert to AI Max-enabled ad groups regardless, and you’d need to disable the relevant features afterward if you want a more restrained setup, or pause the ad groups entirely if you’d rather not run dynamic matching at all.

What happens to my page feed? The page feed itself isn’t deleted, but it stops being the primary targeting mechanism once the ad group converts to standard AI Max matching. Any inclusion and exclusion rules you had in the feed should be reviewed against AI Max’s URL exclusion settings after migration rather than assumed to carry forward with identical scope.

Does this apply to Microsoft Advertising too? Microsoft Advertising has rolled out its own version of AI Max for Search, but it’s a separate product on a separate timeline from Google’s. Don’t assume dates or mechanics announced for one apply to the other — check each platform’s own documentation if you run campaigns on both.

Is there any way to keep a DSA campaign running past February 2027? Not based on what Google has announced. New DSA creation is already blocked, and the automatic migration in February 2027 applies to whatever DSA campaigns are still active at that point. Voluntarily upgrading before then is the only way to control the timing yourself.

What if I don’t manage the account daily and might miss the notices? This is the scenario worth solving for regardless of this specific migration. Between the September 2026 notices, the January 2027 reminder, and the February 2027 migration window, there are three separate points where something material changes in the account, spread across five months. An account that only gets reviewed quarterly will likely catch this after the fact rather than before it.

A practical prep checklist

None of this requires panic — the February 2027 deadline gives real runway — but it does reward doing the work now rather than reactively after the fact. Here’s a sequence that covers the actual risk points:

1. Find out what’s actually exposed. Go through your account (or every account in an MCC) and identify every campaign still running as standalone DSA or with dynamic ad groups. Don’t assume you remember; accounts that have changed hands or been managed by multiple people over the years often have legacy DSA campaigns nobody’s touched in a year that are still live and still spending.

2. Pull a full search term report for every DSA campaign before you touch anything. This becomes your reference for what queries the campaign was actually matching and converting on. If you’ve read how to read a search term report, apply the same lens here specifically to the DSA queries — you’re looking for both the negative keyword candidates that got missed and the genuinely valuable long-tail matches you don’t want to lose after migration.

3. Rebuild or tighten the negative keyword list against AI Max’s matching behavior, not DSA’s. Treat this as a fresh pass, not a copy-paste of what you had. If you haven’t done this exercise recently, building a negative keyword list that actually cuts wasted spend is the place to start — the same discipline applies, just pointed at a different targeting mechanism.

4. Set URL exclusions deliberately rather than relying on inherited page feed logic. Walk your site structure and decide explicitly which sections should never be eligible for final URL expansion — returns and support pages, outdated or discontinued product pages, anything without a clear commercial intent. Set these as exclusion rules inside AI Max rather than assuming the old page feed rules will be interpreted the way you expect.

5. Export a clean performance baseline before migration touches the campaign. Cost, conversions, conversion rate, and CPA by campaign and by top search term, dated and saved somewhere outside the Google Ads UI. This is what lets you actually answer “did the migration hurt performance” instead of guessing based on a gut feeling three months later.

6. Consider a controlled voluntary upgrade instead of waiting for the forced one. Google’s one-click upgrade tools let you convert a DSA campaign to AI Max on your own schedule, with your team watching closely, rather than having it happen automatically alongside every other account on Google’s February timeline with less visibility into exactly when it hit your account. If you have the negative keywords and URL exclusions ready, migrating early on a quiet week gives you more room to catch problems than getting swept up in the mass migration.

7. Set a calendar reminder for late January 2027. When the reminder notifications go out, that’s your last real checkpoint before automatic migration starts. If steps one through five aren’t done by then, that’s the moment to prioritize it, not February when it’s already happening.

Where this fits into the bigger AI Max pattern

If you’ve been following Google Ads changes this year, this is part of a broader pattern rather than an isolated event. Search campaigns increasingly funnel toward AI Max as the default layer of automation, the same direction Google’s earlier auto-upgrade took campaigns that were already leaning on loose targeting. The consistent thread across all of it is that Google is consolidating separate automated-matching mechanisms into one system, and each consolidation event removes a bit of the older, more granular control in favor of broader automation with narrower exclusion-based controls.

That’s not automatically bad — AI Max’s own reporting shows it can genuinely add reach that a purely keyword-based campaign would miss, and the exclusion controls, while different from what DSA offered, are real levers rather than nothing. But it does mean the accounts that come out ahead are the ones that treat each of these migrations as a deliberate configuration change requiring review, not as a background update that can be ignored until it causes a problem.

Why this is easy to miss if nobody’s watching for it

The hardest part of managing through changes like this isn’t the individual steps — building a negative keyword list or exporting a baseline report isn’t complicated work. It’s the fact that Google doesn’t make a lot of noise about the exact moment something in your account changes. The reminder notification sits in the interface among a dozen other recommendations and prompts, and it’s easy for a genuinely important structural change to get the same amount of attention as a suggestion to raise your budget by 10%.

This is part of why continuous daily account monitoring matters more than a monthly or quarterly check-in for accounts that still have exposure to changes like this. Growera’s ERA checks accounts every day rather than on a schedule dictated by whoever remembers to log in, which means a DSA campaign that gets flagged for migration, or one that’s already been converted and is now generating unfamiliar search terms without the old negative keyword coverage, gets caught close to when it happens rather than three months later when someone finally pulls a quarterly report and finds a chunk of wasted spend. It’s not a substitute for doing the negative keyword and URL exclusion work described above — that’s judgment only a person (or a very deliberate process) can apply — but it closes the gap between “Google changed something” and “someone on the account noticed.”

If you’re evaluating whether to act now or wait

There’s a reasonable argument for waiting: the deadline is genuinely months out, Google delayed it once already citing advertiser feedback, and there’s some chance the mechanics shift again before February 2027 arrives. If your DSA campaigns are small, well below the account’s overall spend, and already tightly negative-keyworded, the cost of waiting is low.

The case for acting sooner is stronger if DSA is a meaningful share of your Search spend, if the campaign has years of accumulated negative keyword tuning you don’t want to lose the benefit of, or if you’re managing this across multiple client accounts where a February pileup of migrations would be hard to review individually. In that situation, doing the prep work now and executing a controlled voluntary upgrade on your own schedule is worth the time even though the forced deadline hasn’t arrived.

Either way, the one thing not worth doing is nothing. Even if you decide to wait for the automatic migration, pull the search term report and export the baseline now, while the campaign is still running in its current form. That data becomes much harder to reconstruct meaningfully after the structure has already changed underneath it.

Summary

Dynamic Search Ads is being retired in favor of AI Max for Search, with new DSA creation already blocked as of September 2026 and automatic migration of existing campaigns beginning in February 2027, after Google pushed the original date back to avoid disrupting Q4. The underlying capability — matching queries to relevant pages without a keyword list — isn’t going away, but the separate campaign structure it lived in is, and legacy URL controls get preserved as exclusion rules rather than carried over in their original form. The risk isn’t a sudden outage; it’s negative keyword coverage and URL scoping that quietly stop matching how the new mechanism actually behaves, plus the loss of a clean pre-migration performance baseline if you don’t capture one first. Auditing which campaigns are exposed, rebuilding negative keywords against AI Max’s matching logic rather than DSA’s, setting deliberate URL exclusions, and exporting a baseline before migration touches anything covers most of the real risk — whether you do that work now on your own schedule or wait for the forced migration in February.