AI Max Gets One Report as Google's September Move Ends

Google announced on September 23, 2026 that AI Max for Search is getting a single report showing, for each search term, the assets that were shown and the landing page the user reached. The same post expands the AI Brief closed beta to seven more languages. The report has no date yet: Google says it will share more details and availability later this year.

Updated October 3, 2026: the September window has closed. The sections below were written for the final week and are kept as the record of what to set before the upgrade.

The timing matters more than the features. September is the month Google automatically upgrades campaigns that use campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets to AI Max, and Google expects those upgrades to conclude by the end of September. Advertisers spending this week deciding whether to move early or wait now have Google's answer to the most common objection, which is that AI Max has been hard to audit.

This post covers only the September 23 changes and the end of the September window. The full migration playbook, the DSA delay and the API fields are in earlier posts linked below.

Two things were announced and two were already in motion. The table keeps them apart, with the status Google gives each.

The reporting change is the one that alters a decision. Google's announcement describes the new report as "a single, unified view of the Search ads journey". The objection it answers is a practical one. AI Max can match a query, write the headline and pick the landing page, and until now checking all three for one search term meant three reports and a join by hand. A single row per term makes an AI Max audit a weekly task rather than a project.

What did not change is the control set. AI Brief is guidance in plain language: Google describes messaging, matching and audience guidelines that steer AI Max, but has not said they act as hard exclusions. Brand inclusions and exclusions, location intent controls and URL exclusions remain the levers, as covered in our AI Max playbook from the April launch.

Google's migration post sets September 2026 as the month campaigns using campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets are upgraded to AI Max automatically, and recommends moving before that to keep control of the setup. With a week left, the checklist is short.

The pattern here is the same one our June post on the DSA delay set out: do the control work before the upgrade, because the upgrade copies what it finds. The only new element is the report, and the report is not here yet, so the baseline has to be yours.

When the unified view ships, the three columns it joins answer three different questions. The value is in reading them together for one search term at a time.

Some accounts may reach September 30 without seeing the upgrade land. That is not a reprieve. Google's April post says new DSA campaigns cannot be created through Google Ads, Google Ads Editor or the API once automatic upgrades begin, and the June update kept these two features on the September schedule while moving DSA to February 2027, so the direction of travel is fixed even where the date slips.

Advertisers who also run Microsoft Advertising should note that its product of the same name is not the same product. Our September 1 comparison lists where the two differ, and none of this week's Google changes apply on the other platform. Teams that want the migration and the first audit handled together can see how we run paid media for clients.

Because the unified report is announced and not available, the comparison you will make after the upgrade has to be built from the reports that exist today. The point of a baseline is to answer one question later: did the upgraded campaign reach queries, show assets and land users somewhere you would not have chosen? To answer it you need the same three columns the new report promises, captured per campaign before the change lands.

Export the search terms report for the last 30 days, the asset report for the same window, and the landing page report, each filtered to the campaigns in scope. Keep them as dated files, not dashboards, because a dashboard will show the post-upgrade state the moment the upgrade lands and the before state will be gone. Note the campaign settings alongside: which brand inclusions and exclusions, location intent controls and URL exclusions were in place on the export date, so a later difference can be traced to a setting rather than guessed at.

When the unified report does arrive, it will give you the after side joined per term. Your exports are the before side. Without them, the first audit of an upgraded campaign has nothing to compare against and the question of whether AI Max changed anything becomes a matter of impression.

Keep the baseline for longer than the audit. The same exports let you answer the question that arrives in November, when someone asks whether a change in cost per conversion came from AI Max, a bid change or the season, and the only honest answer is a comparison against the campaign as it was before the upgrade. A dated file costs nothing to keep and cannot be reconstructed later.

The illustrative cases below are the ordinary ways an advertiser loses control of the upgrade without doing anything Google advised against. Each follows from treating the announcement as a reason to relax rather than a reason to prepare.

Controls set after the upgrade: the brand and URL exclusions are added once the campaign has already been upgraded, so the upgraded settings mirror a legacy setup that had none, and the first week runs without them. Measurement during the rollout: performance is judged in the days the upgrade is landing, when settings and matching are both changing, and a temporary movement is read as the result. The forecast reading of 7%: Google’s average for the full feature suite on non-Retail accounts is taken as an expectation for an account that has switched off final URL expansion, which the average does not describe. The early DSA rebuild: Dynamic Search Ads campaigns are torn down and rebuilt as AI Max this week, months before their February 2027 date, instead of using the upgrade tools Google provides to port DSA settings into standard ad groups.

Each is avoided by the four-item checklist in the deadline section, done in order, before September 30. The announcement did not change the order; it only made it more tempting to skip the first item and wait for the report.