WTF has Google Been Doing This Week? 28 SEP 2026
AI Max wants to find more demand. But is it actually incremental?
Google is making AI Max harder to ignore. Campaigns using campaign-level broad match and automatically created assets are being moved across to AI Max this month, while Google has also just announced new reporting designed to give advertisers a clearer view of the AI-driven search journey, including: search term, creative shown and landing page.
The pitch is pretty simple: let Google find more relevant searches and more conversions that traditional keyword targeting might miss.
But there’s a question we think is much more important, and we have been talking about this for a while at Audience Group (including here and here). Are those conversions actually incremental, or is the platform just very good at taking credit for existing intent?
Because keywords are becoming less of a targeting mechanism and more of an input signal into Google’s retrieval system.
Instead of advertisers explicitly choosing which auctions they want to enter, Google plays a greater role in deciding which searches it thinks are relevant based on keywords, landing pages, creative and other signals.
That can absolutely uncover net-new, high-intent demand, but it can also make it harder to distinguish net-new demand from demand that would have been captured anyway.
And that’s where looking at CPA alone gets dangerous. A campaign can report more conversions and a lower CPA while the underlying mix of queries, CPCs and lead quality is changing.
There is another dynamic worth watching as well. Broader matching potentially puts advertisers into more auctions, including auctions they may not previously have entered. More advertisers competing for those searches could change auction density and clearing prices.
AI Max can create an interesting challenge:
- Higher CPCs. More conversions. Lower CPA.
That can still be a very good outcome for an advertiser. But, again – because this is a question we must keep on asking, is this providing incremental, valuable business or simply getting better at attributing existing demand to Search.
Google is clearly investing in giving advertisers more visibility into this. The new AI Max reporting is a step in the right direction. But we’re not going to take the platform’s reported CPA as the whole story. That’s not how we operate.
Here’s what we’re checking in our clients’ accounts
- Query composition: What searches are actually driving the incremental volume?
- CPC: Are we paying more to access that additional demand?
- Lead rate: Is the additional traffic converting?
- Qualified lead rate: Are those leads actually worth something?
- Incrementality: Would we have captured these conversions anyway?
- Search overlap: Are we finding net-new demand or simply shifting credit around?
- AI Max reporting: What is Google actually matching, creating and sending users towards?
The goal is to find more valuable customers for our clients, not simply to get more conversions reported by Google.
And as Google takes more control over which auctions we enter, that’s a distinction we’re paying attention to.
