Google’s AI Max bundle expands where your Search ads can appear and how loosely your keywords are matched. It is pitched as a way to find demand you were missing, and sometimes that is exactly what it does. It can also quietly widen your net to queries that have nothing to do with your business.

The only way to know which is happening is to read the search terms report, not the summary screen. AI Max leans on Google’s matching to decide what counts as relevant, and its idea of relevant and yours are not always the same. Without checking, you are trusting the system to grade its own homework.

We treat features like this the way we treat any automation: useful, but only with someone watching the output. On the accounts we audit, the difference between AI Max helping and AI Max wasting money is almost always whether anyone has looked at the actual queries it is buying.