Six Google Ads strategies that are relevant in 2026

Google Ads has changed more in the last eighteen months than in the five years before it. Most of the advice still circulating online describes a platform that does not exist any more, and some of it is ours. We will get to that.

Key takeaways

• AI Max is not optional, so the question is how you use it. Google has been auto-upgrading legacy Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match into AI Max, mirroring your old settings. If you have not reviewed them, Google picked them for you.
• Your conversion data is the main lever now, not your bids. Smart Bidding decides the auction. What you control is the quality of the signal you feed it.
• Negative keywords matter more under AI matching, not less. The looser the matching, the more budget leaks. We think this is the highest-return hour of manual work left in the platform.
• Stop trying to outrank a named competitor. Target Outranking Share was retired in 2019 and migrated out in 2020. Target Impression Share targets a position, not a rival.
• Assets, not extensions. Google renamed them in 2022. Promotion and call assets are still among the cheapest ways to lift click-through rate, and most of the NZ accounts we audit leave them empty.
• Write for longer, conversational queries. People search in full sentences now because they have learned to talk to AI assistants.

Three shifts matter for strategy.

AI Max moved from beta to default. It arrived in beta in late 2025, hit general availability in early 2026 and has kept expanding since, including into Shopping and travel formats. Google has confirmed Dynamic Search Ads are being upgraded into AI Max, with search term matching, text customisation and final URL expansion switched on to mirror your legacy setup. Google keeps a running list of what is changing on its new features and announcements page, which is worth a bookmark if you manage accounts yourself.

Performance Max became steerable. After years of complaints about the black box, Google added channel performance reporting, search terms reporting and campaign-level negative keywords, and has kept going through 2026 with more steering and reporting controls, including first-party audience exclusions so you can stop paying to reacquire customers you already have.

Bidding controls tightened. Google changed how target-based bid strategies behave on constrained budgets, optimising more consistently toward your target when budget is limited. If your campaigns are budget-capped, that changes how they scale.

The through line: manual levers keep disappearing and data levers keep growing. Everything below follows from that.

The mistake we see most often is treating AI Max as a single switch. It is not. It is three features with three different risk profiles.

Search term matching finds queries your keyword list would miss. Text customisation rewrites headlines to match the query. Final URL expansion sends traffic to whichever page Google decides is most relevant, and that last one is the setting that surprises people, because it will happily route a high-intent searcher to a blog post instead of your product page.

Here is how we start: search term matching only, URL controls left in place, search terms reviewed weekly for the first month. Google has since added more steering, including an AI Brief tool for guiding messaging, and we would rather use those controls than hand the whole thing over and hope. We went through the longer argument in our piece on whether AI Max is worth it.

Once bidding is automated, your leverage moves upstream. Two accounts with identical budgets and identical bid strategies will get different results if one has clean conversion data and the other does not. We see this constantly, and it is rarely the bidding that is broken.

Three things to fix, in this order.

1. Track the conversions that represent revenue. Not every form submission and phone tap.
2. Attach values to them, so the algorithm optimises toward profit rather than volume.
3. Import offline conversions if your sale closes over the phone or in a CRM, so Google learns which leads actually became customers.

None of this is glamorous. It also beats any bid adjustment you could make by hand, and it is usually what determines whether maximise clicks or maximise conversions is the right call for your account.

The classic example still holds. An Indian restaurant bidding on tikka masala wants diners, not home cooks, so recipe, ingredients and how to cook belong on the negative list.

What has changed is the stakes. Under broad matching and AI Max search term matching, the range of queries you can show for is far wider than the keywords you actually entered. Google’s own documentation covers how negative keywords work, and if you are still weighing up match types, our guide to broad match versus exact match covers the trade-offs.

The habit we recommend, and run ourselves: review the search terms report fortnightly, add negatives as you go, and keep one shared negative list applied across campaigns. You can now apply negatives at account level and within Performance Max too, neither of which was true a couple of years ago.

We need to correct ourselves here. An earlier version of this article recommended Target Outranking Share to systematically outbid a named rival. That strategy no longer exists. Google retired it alongside Target Search Page Location and migrated remaining campaigns to Target Impression Share.

Target Impression Share is the modern equivalent, with one important difference. You choose a placement goal, whether that is absolute top of page, top of page, or anywhere on the page, and the share you want to hit. You are buying visibility. You are not beating a specific competitor.

Use it deliberately and sparingly. It optimises for presence rather than conversions or revenue, which makes it useful for brand defence and launches and a poor fit for everyday performance campaigns. Cap the bid limit, or it will spend whatever visibility happens to cost that week.

Extensions became assets in 2022. The rename matters mostly because half the advice online still uses the old word, which tells you how old that advice is.

Promotion assets let you attach a discount to your ad, tied to an occasion or running as an everyday offer, and you can edit them without wiping their performance history. Call assets put your phone number in the ad for people who would rather talk than browse, which still matters enormously for trades, professional services and anything with local intent.

Neither costs anything. Both take minutes. In most of the NZ accounts we audit, at least one is sitting empty.

Queries have got longer. People type and speak in full sentences because they have spent two years talking to AI assistants, and the habit carries straight into Google.

Two implications for us as advertisers, and both come back to how paid search actually works. Your ad copy needs to read naturally against a conversational query rather than a two-word keyword, and your landing page needs to answer the question the query actually asks. Longer queries usually convert better, because the person has already narrowed down what they want, and they often cost less per click because fewer advertisers are competing for them.

One caveat for the local market. Volumes for very long queries are still modest in New Zealand, so we treat this as a trend to get ahead of domestically and a present-day reality for anyone selling into Australia or further afield.

What is AI Max in Google Ads?

AI Max is a set of AI-powered features for Search campaigns covering search term matching, text customisation and final URL expansion. It moved from beta to general availability in early 2026, and Google has been auto-upgrading legacy Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match campaigns into it.

Is Target Outranking Share still available?

No. Google retired Target Outranking Share and Target Search Page Location in 2019, then migrated the remaining campaigns to Target Impression Share in 2020. Target Impression Share is the current equivalent, and it targets a page position rather than a named competitor.

Are Google Ads extensions still called extensions?

No. Google renamed ad extensions to assets in 2022. Promotion extensions became promotion assets, call extensions became call assets. The functionality is broadly the same, but the reporting now sits under the assets section of the account.

How often should I review negative keywords?

We say fortnightly for active accounts, and weekly for the first month of any new campaign or after enabling AI Max features. Broader matching means more irrelevant queries reach your budget, and the search terms report is where most wasted spend turns up.

Do Google Ads strategies differ for New Zealand businesses?

The mechanics are identical, but the conditions are not. Lower search volumes mean Smart Bidding takes longer to gather enough conversion data, so accurate tracking matters more and you need patience before judging performance. Long conversational queries are also less common here than in larger markets.

There is a lot to weigh up in a Google Ads strategy in 2026, which is why most companies hand it to someone who does it daily. We manage Google Ads and Performance Max campaigns for New Zealand businesses selling locally and globally.

If your campaigns have been running on settings nobody has looked at since the AI Max upgrades landed, get in touch for an account review. That is usually where we start anyway.