The End of DSA Campaigns in Google Ads. Why might you pay more for advertising starting in September?

Google is once again pushing the boundary between control and automation. The official announcement of the phase-out of Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns and automatically generated assets is more than just a technical update to advertising systems. It represents a fundamental shift in performance marketing.

Replacing these solutions with AI Max raises a critical question for Marketing Managers: how to protect advertising budgets while maintaining control over actual market share.

From the perspective of a manager responsible for annual profitability, traditional DSA campaigns – despite their level of automation – still provided measurable control points. They allowed for precise decisions regarding landing page architecture, keyword structures, and exclusions.

The introduction of AI Max significantly reduces this level of transparency. In the new model, the algorithm autonomously decides on:

• the selection of user search queries,
• multi-variant generation of ad creatives,
• the final routing of traffic to specific website pages.

For organizations, this means entering a so-called “black box” model. The risk is not that artificial intelligence will fail to generate sessions. The real issue lies in lead quality and the stability of key performance indicators. If the system begins interpreting user intent too broadly, the budget may be consumed by low-converting traffic, creating the illusion of growth in campaign metrics without translating into actual revenue.

The implementation process has been planned in stages, giving mature marketing organizations time to reassess their current strategies:

• Testing phase (currently): this is the moment to launch controlled experimental campaigns in the AI Max format. The objective is not blind migration, but rigorous comparative analytics and validation.
• September 2026 (automatic migration): Google will begin the mandatory transformation of existing DSA campaigns into the new ecosystem. From that point onward, manual creation of dynamic ads in the old format will be disabled.
• Full automation (following months): AI Max will take over complete management of bidding and targeting. Decision-making on the marketer’s side will be reduced to a purely strategic role.

The changes introduced by Google carry significant implications that Marketing Managers should take into account.

If inconsistent or inaccurate conversion signals are fed into the Google Ads system, AI Max will optimize budgets toward seemingly cheap actions rather than high-value transactions with the strongest margins. As a result, companies that leave campaigns without rigorous analytical oversight will quickly experience higher customer acquisition costs and a decline in budget efficiency.

The growth of automation and AI-driven solutions within Google Ads means that the role of the Marketing Manager is increasingly shifting away from manual campaign management toward strategic oversight of data quality, analytics, and business optimization.

The end of the DSA era means far more than just an update to advertising tools. It marks a moment when automation takes over the majority of operational activities – from bid management to keyword selection. Agency competencies are no longer measured by the number of manual optimizations, but by the quality of data, control, and strategic oversight.

Today, an effective marketing partner is responsible for integrating CRM systems with Google Ads, preparing websites for AISO, and protecting budgets from incorrect AI-driven decisions.

As automation continues to evolve, the importance of data quality and control grows even further, because these factors now determine whether algorithms are truly delivering business objectives or simply generating misleading performance results.