Google’s forced upgrade
🥲 Google is about to force an upgrade you're not ready for, Google and Pinterest are using AI to help advertisers uncover new growth opportunities, and more!
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🥲 Google Is About to Force an Upgrade You’re Not Ready For
🚀 Google and Pinterest See the Same Opportunity
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🥲 Google Is About to Force an Upgrade You’re Not Ready For
In September 2026, Google begins forced migration of all remaining Search campaigns to AI Max. The voluntary window closes then. The accounts that won’t feel it are the ones that already have a negative keyword governance system built, because AI Max’s matching is aggressive enough that without one, it will find budget to spend on queries you’d never consciously target. Here’s the system.
Three-Tier Negative Keyword Structure
Account level: Universal exclusions applied across every campaign. Job intent (careers, salary, hiring), DIY and informational modifiers (how-to, free, tutorial), and any query category that structurally never converts for your business. Set these once and forget them.
Campaign level: Intent exclusions specific to that campaign’s commercial goal. A campaign targeting buyers doesn’t need competitor brand terms or comparison queries unless you’re actively bidding on them elsewhere.
Ad group level: Conflict prevention. If you’re running multiple keywords in the same account, add each as a negative in every other ad group to prevent cannibalization and split delivery.
The Weekly Review That Keeps It Clean
AI Max tests irrelevant searches for weeks before learning they don’t convert, unless you manually prevent it. Weekly review for high-spend campaigns, bi-weekly for lower-spend:
→ Queries with high impressions and zero conversions: add as negatives immediately
→ Close variants with wrong intent: AI Max will keep testing them until you tell it not to
→ Thematically related but commercially irrelevant queries: the most common AI Max budget leak
Pay special attention to phrase match. A campaign targeting “project management software” now regularly surfaces for “project management certification” and “project management job openings” in 2026. Those don’t add themselves to your negative list.
The September Deadline
Accounts with 100 to 500 negatives across shared lists, campaign-level, and ad group-level are the ones that absorb the AI Max migration without a CPA spike. Accounts without that infrastructure hand the algorithm a blank check and call the first two months of results a learning phase.
September is closer than it looks.
🚀 Google and Pinterest See the Same Opportunity
Pinterest and Google are rolling out new AI-powered advertising tools designed to help marketers find new customers and scale campaigns more efficiently. The updates focus on automation, smarter targeting, and giving advertisers more ways to capture demand without rebuilding campaigns from scratch.
The Breakdown:
Demand Discovery Features - Google expanded Smart Bidding Exploration, giving campaigns more flexibility to pursue untapped search demand. Advertisers using the feature saw an average 18% increase in unique converting search categories and a 19% increase in conversions.
Seasonal Scaling Controls - Google’s new Promotion Mode lets advertisers temporarily increase budgets and adjust ROAS targets during launches, holidays, and sales, while improving performance consistency for budget-limited campaigns.
Customer Growth Tools - Pinterest launched Performance+ New Customer Acquisition, allowing advertisers to prioritize finding new buyers by uploading customer lists and assigning higher values to first-time customers. In testing, the feature drove a 64% increase in new-customer conversions.
Faster Campaign Launches - Pinterest also introduced one-click Performance+ Shopping campaigns for eligible Shopify merchants. Brands can now launch AI-optimized Pinterest campaigns directly from Shopify with best practices automatically applied.
Pinterest is making customer acquisition easier for smaller businesses, while Google is giving advertisers more ways to discover demand and scale during key sales periods. The common theme is simple: less manual setup, more automated growth.
💃Events
🔥 What Google’s AI Search Update Means For Your Content
Tomorrow | 60 Minutes | Virtual Event
The biggest takeaway from I/O 2026 isn’t a new feature. It’s a new discovery model. Learn how AI Mode chooses sources, why some content earns citations while other pages get ignored, and the workflows helping brands stay visible as traditional search behavior continues to change.
Can’t make it live? Register anyway, you’ll get the recordings within 24hours.
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The three-tier negative structure is the right model, but in practice the hardest part isn't building it before September — it's maintaining it when AI Max starts testing laterally into adjacent categories your brand team considers 'close enough.' What we're consistently seeing with retail and DTC accounts is that the query categories that create the most political friction aren't the obvious brand/competitor exclusions but the informational modifiers in categories where the brand has content marketing ambitions — the paid and organic teams end up in a standoff over the same search queries.