Is AI Max worth trying in your Google Search campaign?
What is AI Max?
AI Max is a new feature Google has been rolling out that allows your paid search campaigns to appear in AI Mode and the AI Overview results. If you don’t have this feature turned on, your ads will not appear in any of Google’s AI Overviews.
AI Max works by using broad match with keyword-less targeting. For example, if you’re running ads for available units in your apartment complex, someone who previously searched for apartments near me may still see your ad later while they search for new furniture. Their earlier apartment-related search signals that they are likely looking for a new apartment, and Google uses this signal along with other contextual cues to determine overall intent. With AI Max, broad match and keyword-less matching interprets this behavior more broadly. Even though the individual is now searching for furniture, they have already demonstrated intent related to moving, so AI Max expands the types of queries your ad can appear for. As a result, your ad can still show when they begin a new search for furniture.
How to Turn on AI Max
The paid advertising team at Arc Intermedia has been testing AI Max on several client accounts. To set up this experiment, go into your campaign settings. Under the budget and bidding optimization section, you should see a new option called AI Max for Search Campaigns. To activate it, simply toggle on the “Optimize your campaign with AI Max” setting. Setup really is that easy.
There are also a few additional options to choose from, including:
- Text customization, which uses AI to pull text from your website, landing pages, and ads to create customized ad copy assets
- Final URL expansion, which sends traffic to the most relevant pages on your website when it’s likely to improve performance
- A brand setting that allows you to include or exclude specific brands in your searches, giving you control over whether you want to appear for your own branded terms or exclude them, along with any brands
For our tests, we turned off both text customization and final URL expansion so we could isolate the performance potential of AI Max itself.
AI Max
We tested this feature across multiple industries, ranging from early childcare services to brand certification services. In all cases, we saw an increase in impressions in the campaigns where AI Max was enabled.
However, we did not see an increase in clickthrough rates or conversions.
When reviewing the search terms that came in, we were not impressed with their quality. Many terms felt irrelevant, which aligns with the lift in impressions but not in actionable metrics such as clicks, clickthrough rates, or conversions.
When to Use AI Max
Most advanced Google features tend to be with retail and broad consumer audiences in mind, so we wanted to test how AI Max would perform for B2B and niche offerings. Our results ultimately confirmed that suspicion: AI Max is another tool that currently works best for B2C environments.
While AI Max can be useful in situations where campaigns target wide, consumer-focused audiences, it becomes far less effective when the audience is narrow or highly specialized. The clients we tested operate in niche industries with smaller, more defined search pools, which makes it difficult for AI Max to generate highly relevant queries. For that same reason, I do not expect it to perform well for many B2B clients because the limited volume and higher level of specificity required increases the likelihood that AI Max will expand into irrelevant queries.
That said, AI Max is strong for brand exposure and awareness. If your campaign goal is visibility, AI Max can help achieve that at a relatively low cost. For one client, we saw:
- About a 10 percent decrease in cost per click
- 66 percent increase in impressions
- 10 percent increase in clicks
AI Max expands your reach throughout the search process, although it does not necessarily deliver an increase in qualified leads.
Are Ads Shown in AI Overviews Without AI Max?
As mentioned earlier, if AI Max is not turned on, your ads will not appear in AI overviews. Does that mean you should enable it? As noted in the above section, it depends on your account and campaign goals. If your objective is to expand brand awareness, turning on AI Max can be an effective way to increase visibility at a relatively low cost. However, if your goal is lead generation, I would not recommend enabling AI Max. In our experiments, it did not improve lead quality and instead led to higher spend with increased visibility only.
Another factor to consider is your SEO strategy. Are your SEO efforts helping your brand appear in AI overviews? This is a valuable channel, but there are multiple ways to appear in AI overviews through both organic visibility and paid ads. On the paid side, the key is determining whether AI Max aligns with your specific account and campaign goals.
In other words: Right now, AI Max is the only way to have ads appear in Google’s AI results. But that is not enough of a reason on its own to enable the feature. Instead, determine the best strategy for your exact type of business and goals.
The experts at Arc Intermedia can assess your goals and help you determine the best strategy for you.
My Opinion
Overall, I think AI Max can be useful depending on your industry and your campaign goals. Google began rolling out this feature in May 2025, so I expect it will continue to evolve. I am hopeful that Google’s search intent signals will improve over time, which could make AI Max a strong feature for many types of campaigns.
At Arc, we plan to continue testing AI Max to better understand how to use it effectively for clients across different industries and objectives.
If you’re interested in exploring whether AI Max could support your marketing strategy, reach out to our team to discuss how we can help.
