Three things actually changed in PMax this year. Not just announced, actually shipped. AI Max for Shopping, negative keywords going from 100 to 10,000, and channel-level reporting.
That last one sounds minor. It isn't.
1. AI Max for Shopping
What actually changed
Standard Shopping campaigns used to be reactive. Someone types "blue running shoes size 10," your feed has that product, you show up. No query, no ad. Clean and simple, but limited.
Conversational searches were out of reach. If someone typed "what shoes should I get for my first 5K race," Standard Shopping couldn't handle it. Too vague. Nothing in the feed matched those words.
To get that kind of reach, you had to run PMax. Which meant giving up control over which channels get budget, which queries get matched, and where traffic lands on your site.
- Matches exact feed text to search query
- Misses conversational searches
- Fully transparent, fully controlled
- No audience expansion
- AI matches products to intent, not just words
- Handles conversational queries
- Same product targeting and bidding controls
- Finds new audiences Google predicts will convert
The short version: Standard Shopping used to wait for the right search. AI Max goes and finds the right person, even if they didn't type the perfect words.
Does it apply to existing campaigns?
Yes. Opt-in. One click in campaign settings. It applies to your existing campaign. No need to create a new one.
When you enable it, two things change:
Text customization: Google can rewrite your ad copy based on what the person searched.
Final URL expansion: Google picks which page on your site to send traffic to, not necessarily the product page.
Watch URL expansion closely. If Google starts routing traffic to your homepage instead of a product page, conversion rate drops. Most accounts benefit from turning URL expansion off and leaving text customization on.
Why not just run Standard Shopping + PMax for broader reach?
A lot of advertisers do this. It isn't wrong.
The problem: in every auction, Google has to decide which of your campaigns to enter. PMax almost always wins that decision. Google confirmed this officially. So your Standard Shopping campaign (the one you control) gets less traffic than expected because PMax absorbs the impressions.
The workaround is adding strong negatives to PMax so it doesn't compete on your best queries. Without that, you're paying for two campaigns that partly cancel each other out.
AI Max on Standard Shopping avoids that problem because there's only one campaign. One budget. One place for the algorithm to learn. No internal competition.
If your Standard Shopping is already performing well, don't touch it. Add PMax with a capped budget first and watch what happens. The safest move is always to not break what's working.
How to check if AI Max is available for your campaign
Alternatively: go to Edit settings and look for "Text customization" or "Final URL expansion." If either appears, you have access.
2. Negative Keywords: from 100 to 10,000
This one quietly changed everything.
With 100 negatives, you had to pick very carefully. You couldn't block much. PMax was, for practical purposes, impossible to control at the query level. Most advertisers accepted the black box and moved on.
10,000 negatives means you can build a real exclusion list. Block competitor names. Block irrelevant categories. Block navigational searches. Block branded queries you want handled by a separate Search campaign. It turns PMax from a black box into something you can actually steer.
If you haven't updated your negative keyword list since this limit changed, that's the first thing to fix. Not AI Max. This. It has the highest impact for the least risk, and it can be done today.
3. Channel-Level Reporting
Before this change, PMax showed you one blended number. Total spend, total conversions. You couldn't tell if YouTube was eating the budget while Search carried all the results.
Some accounts were paying Google to run YouTube ads they didn't want, with no visibility into it. The reporting made it invisible.
Now you can see spend and performance by channel, separately: Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps.
What to do with it
Start with YouTube spend. In most ecommerce accounts, YouTube gets a large share of PMax budget and contributes the least to direct conversions. Knowing that number lets you make a real decision about whether the brand awareness is worth it, rather than guessing.
If YouTube is taking 30% of your PMax budget and contributing 5% of conversions, that's a conversation worth having with your client, or with yourself if you manage your own account.
Channel reporting won't change performance on its own. But it gives you the data to ask the right questions. That's what was missing.
Not sure how these changes affect your account?
I audit ecommerce Google Ads accounts every month. Structural issues with PMax (wrong negatives, no channel visibility, AI Max on wrong settings) are the most common things I find.
Get a free auditWhere to start
If you manage Shopping or PMax campaigns and haven't addressed these three changes, here's the order that makes sense:
Start with negative keywords. Low risk, high impact, can be done today. Build a proper exclusion list now that you have 10,000 slots.
Then turn on channel reporting. Just look at where the budget actually goes. No action required yet. Just get visibility.
Then consider AI Max. Test it on a secondary campaign before touching your main one. Turn off URL expansion. Watch conversion rate carefully in the first two weeks.
The goal isn't to enable every new feature. It's to know what each one does before you decide.