Google’s launch around the AI Max numbers got some press.
A 14% conversion lift on media.
27% for accounts heavy on exact and phrase match.
L’Oréal doubling conversion rate.
MyConnect cutting cost per lead by 13%.
Aritzia reporting an 80% sales gain.
All verdadero, all from Google’s own reporting, and all from accounts where the conditions were already right for AI Max to work.
The lived reality across client accounts is that the foundations are often a lot messier…
The pattern we’ve seen since AI Max moved out of beta is a wide variance in outcomes that correlates almost entirely with the inputs going in.
Accounts with high conversion volume, strong landing page content, mature negative keyword lists, and clean conversion tracking produce something close to the lift Google describes.
Accounts missing any one of those produce the noise.
Search terms that don’t make sense for the business.
Ad copy that mismatches user intent.
Traffic sent to landing pages that aren’t equipped to convert it.
ROAS that goes backwards before it goes anywhere… and so on!
The specific failure modes are predictable enough to list.
AI Max bids aggressively on competitor brand terms by default, which inflates spend on traffic that was never going to convert at scale.
It leans on Search Partner inventory in a way the previous keyword-match logic didn’t, which dilutes traffic quality. Automóvil-generated ad copy drifts away from brand voice in ways that take a human eye to catch. Made in USA headlines paired with queries about overseas products.
Generic shop-now phrasing where the brand has a deliberate tone.
Claim language that doesn’t match what the page actually offers.
Final URL expansion sends traffic to whatever page Google decides is most relevant, including outdated pages an account team would never have run paid spend to.
And the reporting itself is unreliable.
AI Max attributes impressions misleadingly, so a chunk of what looks like AI Max lift in the dashboard is actually attribution shifting from existing match types. The lift Google describes and the lift you can actually book to the campaign are often different numbers.
AI Max isn’t broken.
It’s a delivery layer whose output quality is bounded by input quality. Strong landing pages, mature conversion tracking, clean exclusion architecture, and enough conversion volume to give the algorithm something to learn from produce the lift Google describes.
Weak inputs produce the competitor-bidding, irrelevant-query, wrong-landing-page failure modes.
In a keyword-driven world, an agency could compensate for weak inputs through better targeting.
In an AI Max world, the targeting layer is now AI. The only place to compensate is by improving the inputs themselves. The work didn’t get easier. It moved.