Google Ads AI Max Explained [2025]

Key Takeaways

So Google ads have made another big step in the move towards being more AI focused and this comes in the form of their latest update AIAX for search campaigns. Now this is something that is actively being rolled out at the moment. You may already have it inside your Google Ads account and we are very much testing different approaches and different styles of using AMAX across our clients in order to get the best results for them. And that's exactly what this video is going to be about, explaining what AIAX is, one, and two, what we think are the biggest questions and approaches to get the most out of this new feature. So, AI Max is a one-click upgrade to your Google search ad campaigns. It is not a new campaign type like performance max. It is a feature within search campaigns that supercharges them with AI to enhance their targeting, landing page destinations, and creative optimizations. Now, the purpose of this feature is to allow you to reach more high converting traffic on Google. And a big part of that is being able to target people before they even know exactly what they want. For example, you're bidding on the keyword red midi dress. But AIAX could show you for a search term like midi dresses for spring and summer. Now, as well as optimized keyword targeting, AIAX contains two really powerful elements, and these are the text customizations and the final URL feature. These are pretty much identical to the features that you see in Performance Max. So, there really is nothing new here. However, you can leverage the power of these features within your search campaigns. That's the real big upgrade and it is essentially the same setting, but just applied to your search campaigns. Okay, so now we've covered what AIAX is and how it works. I'm going to now cover the most common questions I've been getting from my clients about AIAX. And hopefully this helps you understand this feature in more detail. So firstly, how is AIAX any different to a broad match or DSA campaign? Well, in practice, AIAX is pretty much a hybrid between broad match and a DSA. And that's because AIAX will combine your optimized keyword targeting which comes with broad match, but it will also leverage the text customization and the landing page matching that comes with um a DSA campaign. So, you're sort of getting the best of both worlds, which is a really, really cool thing to have. Okay, so next question is, can AIAX only work with broad match keywords or can you apply it to phrase and exact match keywords? And the answer to this is yes, you definitely can apply AIAX to your exact and phrase match keywords. And the results Google are showing are pretty interesting on this. So according to Google, campaigns are typically seen a 14% uplift when switching to AIAX. But for campaigns that are actually using phrase and exact match, those campaigns are seeing a 27% uplift when moving to AIAX. Now, we do need to take this with a pinch of salt. It is Google. They are always going to pump their data and make it look better than it usually is. But these are promising statistics nevertheless. Okay. And lastly, and this is the big question that I've been getting a lot is, is Google Ads moving to a keywordless environment where we just let the algorithm do its thing and keywords ultimately just get phased out altogether? Now, no one really knows the future when it comes to Google ads. Anyone making solid predictions, I would be pretty wary of. However, this is an indication of the direction Google are going in or at least it's a very strong indication of the direction they want to go in. So, I think it's safe to say keywords will be around for a while. However, it's going to be an environment where we the algorithm starts to have more control over how the targeting works with keywords. I don't see an environment where keywords are completely phased out, at least for the next couple of years. However, we're going to just have to give the algorithm more control and work in that type of environment. Okay, so now I want to move on to the last section of this video where we are going to break down how to best use AI imax if you are going to apply this feature within your Google Ads account. So before turning on AMAX, here's a super short checklist of things you should have in place or at least be aware of. So the first and arguably the most important thing is making sure your conversion tracking has been set up correctly. That's going to be things like your enhanced conversion or server side tracking. Just making sure all of that is in place because Google ultimately works off um data. So if it has that rich data feed of conversions to uh target off or at least use as a baseline, well your AIAX is naturally going to perform really really well because it actually has that well-rounded form of data of what a customer or a lead looks like. Second is you want to make sure that the landing pages on your website are well structured. By this I mean your landing pages need to be relevant and align with the keywords that you are targeting within the campaign that has AIAX switched on. This will allow Google to easily crawl your landing page and understand the semantics so it can clearly match um your landing pages to the right search. Lastly, I would highly recommend if you are going to use AIAX is to isolate it into its own search campaign. And the reason you want to do this is because you don't want to turn on this new feature and blend it in with your top performing legacy keywords. This is just going to throw a whole new level of complexity into that campaign and it will probably diminish the returns you are seeing because Google now has to readjust to this new setting. What you're better off doing is breaking those keywords out into a separate campaign, flicking on the AIAX feature, and AB testing them side by side. All right, so thank you very much. That is my first impressions of AIAX. Overall, I think it's a really really cool feature when applied correctly. We are still in the early stages, so we can expect more uh you could say optimizations to be rolled out by Google. But overall, it's really really exciting and it definitely is a move within the direction of AI. Hope you enjoyed the video. Free Google Ads course in the description. I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.