Google just handed your ad account to an AI. What I'd give it — and what I'd never hand over
Chandan KumarFounder · Performance Marketing SpecialistOn 20 May, Google Marketing Live made the direction official: AI Max is now a year old, it's the fastest-growing Search product Google has ever shipped, and it's spreading into Shopping, travel and everything else. Add the new AI Brief tool, agentic campaigns that plan and build themselves, and Gemini wired through the whole stack, and the message to advertisers is hard to miss — Google would like to drive your account for you. I read most ad-platform news the same way: not 'what's new', but 'what does this change about my job'. The honest answer is that the steering wheel is moving from your hands to Google's AI, and most accounts I audit are about to hand over exactly the wrong things while clinging to the wrong things.
Agentic ads are real now — the job changed, the goal didn't
Let's be clear about what 'agentic' means in practice, stripped of the keynote gloss. You give the system a goal and your assets, and it decides the keywords, the match types, the audiences, the creative permutations and the placements — then it keeps changing them without asking you first. AI Max already does a lighter version of this; the 2026 announcements push it further and wider, across Search, YouTube and Shopping. For fifteen years, the craft of a Google account was manual control: structuring campaigns, sculpting keywords, pruning placements every week. A lot of that craft is now being automated out from under us.
Here's the part founders miss in both the panic and the hype: the goal hasn't moved an inch. We still exist to buy profitable customers at a cost that makes sense against margin. What's changed is where the leverage sits. The hours we used to spend micromanaging match types are better spent on the inputs the AI can't invent — the offer, the unit economics, and the quality of the signal we feed it. The agencies that lose in this shift are the ones whose entire value was button-pushing. The ones that win move up the stack to the decisions a model can't make for you.
Hand over the busywork, keep the strategy
So here's the line we draw on every account. We let Google's AI own execution: real-time bidding, match-type and query expansion, creative permutations, placement selection. Frankly, the machine does this faster and at a scale no human team can match, and fighting it with rigid manual structures usually just starves it of data and makes it perform worse. If your instinct is to cage AI Max inside tight exact-match keywords, you're paying for a Ferrari and driving it in first gear.
What we never hand over is strategy. The offer and its positioning. The audience definition at the level of who is genuinely worth acquiring. The conversion goal — and whether it's a real one. The margin and CAC-payback targets that decide what 'good' even means. Brand-safety exclusions. These are judgement calls rooted in the business, not pattern-matching over click data, and Google's AI has no idea what a customer is worth to you over three years. It optimises toward the goal you hand it. If that goal is sloppy, it will scale the sloppiness with terrifying efficiency.
Clean conversion data is now your steering wheel
This is the single biggest shift, and almost nobody talks about it. In an agentic account, you don't steer with bids and keywords any more — you steer with the conversion signal you send back. AI Max is only as smart as the data it optimises toward. If you count every form-fill as a conversion and half of them are students, job-seekers and tyre-kickers, the AI will diligently go and find you more students, job-seekers and tyre-kickers, because that's exactly what you told it 'success' looks like.
So the work we used to put into bid management now goes into measurement. Server-side tracking, so we don't lose conversions to browser restrictions. Offline conversion import, so when a lead actually becomes a paying customer weeks later, that fact flows back into Google and the AI learns which clicks were worth it. Value-based bidding, so a ₹2-lakh enquiry isn't treated the same as a ₹5,000 one. Get this right and AI Max becomes genuinely powerful. Get it wrong and you've built an extremely efficient machine for buying the wrong leads.
Turn on the guardrails Google buried in the settings
Agentic does not mean unsupervised, and the 2026 release quietly added controls precisely because early AI Max accounts wandered. Final URL expansion will send traffic to whichever page on your site the AI thinks is relevant — which is great until it sends a paid click to a careers page or a dead offer. The new text-disclaimer feature exists so required text actually appears even when the AI rewrites your ad, which matters enormously for any regulated client.
On a recent account in a regulated category, the difference between approved and suspended came down to using brand exclusions, account-level negatives, URL-expansion controls and disclaimers properly — not to clever bidding. So before we let any AI Max campaign loose, we set the guardrails: where it can send traffic, what it can never say, which queries it must avoid, which brand terms it can't waste budget on. You're not driving the car any more. But you had better be the one who decided where it's allowed to go.
Key takeaways
- Automate execution — bids, expansion, permutations, placements — and own strategy: offer, audience, margin, brand safety.
- Your conversion data is the new steering wheel; clean it and feed back real value before you scale AI Max.
- Agentic isn't unsupervised — set URL-expansion, exclusion and disclaimer guardrails before you launch.
Written by
Mr. Chandan Kumar
Founder & Performance Marketing Director, Global Info Edge
Founder of Global Info Edge and a performance-marketing specialist with 15+ years in the digital marketing world — Google & Meta ads, conversion funnels and growth.
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