On 5 August 2026, a British tribunal certified a class action bringing together close to 880,000 businesses against several Google entities, claiming up to £5 billion for pricing practices alleged to have been unfavourable to them for years (PPC Land). The case is only at the certification stage and the allegations have yet to be decided on the merits, but the timing deserves attention: at the very moment a court recognises that hundreds of thousands of advertisers may legitimately question pricing mechanisms they could not verify, Google and Meta are asking those same advertisers to delegate more decisions to them. Targeting, ad creative, budget allocation: three areas where automation is advancing fast this summer, on both platforms.
1 September: the switch to automation, with no opt-out
AI Max for Search left beta in April 2026. It bundles three automations that take away a good part of the advertiser's control over the queries that trigger its ads and the pages they point to: search term matching, which succeeds broad match, AI-generated ad text, and automatic final URL expansion. On 5 August 2026, Google announced by email, with no accompanying blog post, that any account using Automatically Created Assets or campaign-level broad match would switch automatically to AI Max from 1 September, a deadline we have detailed. There is no opt-out mechanism: the only way to avoid the switch is to disable these legacy settings, or to activate AI Max yourself before the date and choose your own parameters. Under market pressure, Google has already stepped back once: the forced migration of Dynamic Search Ads was postponed in June, from September 2026 to February 2027.
Nineteen days before that switch, on 12 August 2026, the invalid traffic detection company Lunio published a study covering more than 414 million clicks analysed between October 2025 and June 2026 (PPC Land). On the same retail accounts, Search campaigns using AI Max show 72% more invalid traffic than classic Search campaigns. The invalid traffic rate on AI Max rose from 2.46% to 5.28% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, more than double, while the rate for classic campaigns in the same accounts fell from 3.72% to 3.07%. Lunio sells anti-fraud tools: the study also serves its commercial interests, which leaves its methodology intact and calls for a critical reading. What it measures is a higher invalid traffic rate, which does not necessarily mean lower net profitability once the fraud has been neutralised. For its part, Google puts forward an internal figure of 7% average conversion uplift with AI Max, a number that cannot be independently verified and should be neither rejected nor validated as it stands.
Since 1 July, automation is also a contractual clause
Google rewrote the Google Ads terms of service on 1 July 2026, the first substantial overhaul in around eight years (Search Engine Land). No re-acceptance is required: all accounts are automatically bound by the new terms. The central clause authorises Google and its affiliates to serve ads through automated features that format, select or generate targets, ads and destinations. The old terms presented these features as optional; the new ones reverse the default. They also extend the use of data entered in Google Ads conversational experiences, which can be reused across different features. The structural point for a business owner: responsibility for reviewing, approving or withdrawing any automatically generated campaign remains entirely on the advertiser's side, while decision-making authority shifts to the platform.
Performance Max opens up to control, in stages and under pressure from advertisers
PMax has suffered, rightly, from a charge of opacity since its launch in 2021: there is no way to know which channel the budget is actually spent on. Google has conceded ground in stages: brand keyword controls in 2023, placement reporting, then account-level placement exclusions in January 2026. At the end of July 2026, a limited alpha test began allowing some advertisers to exclude the Search Partner Network and Display from their PMax campaigns (PPC Land).
The reading that follows fits in one sentence: at Google, transparency works as a retention product before it is a cost to be cut. An Optmyzr study of 503 accounts, with data going back to February 2025, shows keyword overlap between Search and PMax in 91.45% of the accounts analysed, including in exact match. The study itself specifies that the performance gap between the two campaign types is, in most cases, not significant: cannibalisation is frequent, its real impact varies and has to be measured account by account. This is no plea to switch off PMax wholesale, and the new controls are real progress rather than cosmetic gestures.
AIxH's view
These three moves tell the same story in three forms: product, contract, transparency. Each widens what escapes the advertiser's direct control, and each structurally benefits a platform paid on the volume of ad spend. Our Google Ads agency in Luxembourg starts from the opposite principle: close monitoring of a campaign, theme by theme, term by term, remains the only way to verify what an automation does to a campaign's performance, or to a budget, before letting it run unsupervised. If your campaigns use broad match or account-level Automatically Created Assets, an audit shows precisely what switches on 1 September, and what can still be kept under control.