DSAs Are Done. Here’s What That Actually Means for Your Account.
- Ameet Khabra
- Apr 15
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 18
Table of Contents
As Google phases out Dynamic Search Ads in favour of AI Max for Search, advertisers need to focus on signal quality, campaign controls, and migration strategy to avoid losing efficiency and oversight.
Google has officially announced the sunset of Dynamic Search Ads, and the replacement they’re pointing you toward is AI Max for Search. The timeline is confirmed: migration tools are rolling out now to help transfer settings and data into standard ad groups, and in September 2026, any DSA campaigns and ad groups you haven’t migrated manually will be moved automatically.
If you’ve been running DSAs as your catch-all layer, as a gap-filler for long-tail traffic, or as the structural workhorse underneath a tightly managed keyword campaign, September is your real deadline and the window between now and then is where the work happens.
Why Dynamic Search Ads worked for so long
DSAs have been around since 2011, and they worked because they were simple: point Google at your website, write your descriptions, let it match queries to relevant landing pages and generate headlines from your content. The mechanism was transparent enough that most practitioners understood what they were giving up (control over headlines and keyword targeting) in exchange for what they were getting (coverage they hadn’t mapped manually).
For accounts with large inventory, complex service offerings, or constantly changing page content, that tradeoff made sense. You knew what the system was doing and roughly why.
AI Max is not a like-for-Like replacement
AI Max operates on a different logic. It’s positioned as a more capable tool, and the performance claims are real in some contexts, but the differences in how it operates matter. Where DSAs matched based on your page content against a user’s typed query, AI Max determines relevance based on inferred intent. Google has been explicit about this: it’s matching based on what the system believes the user wanted, not what they typed.
Brad Geddes documented the practical consequence of this when he found that AI Max treats all keywords as broad match, regardless of their actual match type, and attributes conversions to AI Max that would have been captured by your existing exact and phrase match keywords anyway. The incrementality numbers Google shows you need to be interrogated before you act on them.
What to check before migrating to AI Max
Signal quality is the first thing to audit
The signal quality question is the one to start with. DSAs were predictable enough that most advertisers knew what they were measuring. AI Max introduces enough ambiguity into the search term report that you can end up in a situation where performance looks correct at the reporting level while the system has already updated its understanding of what a good outcome looks like, using data you wouldn’t have approved as a signal.
Conversion setup
Before you do anything else, audit your conversion setup. AI Max will go looking for what you’ve defined as a win. If your primary conversions are phone calls where quality is questionable, it will optimize toward phone calls with questionable quality, faster and at greater scale than your DSA campaigns ever did. The migration tools are useful scaffolding; they don’t audit your conversion setup, they don’t build your negative keyword lists categorically, and they don’t review whether the signals you were rewarding in DSA are the ones you actually want AI Max learning from. That part of the migration is still yours.
Match type
Maintain your exact match guardrails. Exact match keywords in the same account still act as guardrails for your highest-intent queries and help establish what “good” looks like before you introduce broader matching behaviour. Google is prioritizing a consolidated workflow where keywords, landing page targeting, and assets all live in one ad group, which is a structural change, but the job stays the same: know which signals are making you money and which are noise.
Brand and Headline control
Use Text Guidelines for brand and headline control before you migrate, not after. DSA descriptions gave us some control over messaging, and Text Guidelines are the replacement for that function; they let you set rules for what AI-generated assets can and can’t say. Brand and Location Controls are now also available at the ad group level.
Search Partner
Review your Search Partners settings. Research from Mike Ryan flagged that Search Partners sees a disproportionate share of sophisticated invalid traffic (malicious bots), and AI Max’s broader matching behaviour means budget can end up there faster than you’d expect. And if you have excluded specific pages in DSA, map those exclusions into your AI Max URL rules before migrating; the exclusion logic doesn’t transfer automatically.
AI Max can work — but only with lean inputs
The honest assessment of AI Max is that it works best when your signals are clean, your conversion tracking is tight, and you have enough data volume for the system to learn accurately. An independent study from the folks at Smarter Ecommerce, testing across more than 250 retail campaigns, found it delivered conversions at roughly 35% lower ROAS than traditional match types. The inputs matter more than the tool.
DSAs gave you relatively predictable coverage with a known set of tradeoffs. AI Max gives you broader reach with less visibility into how it’s making decisions. Stay deliberate about what you feed it and what you tell it to ignore.
The system will follow your instructions. Make sure your instructions are right.
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