What AI Max is
AI Max is a new functionality layer for Search campaigns in Google Ads. Three things bundled together:
A new match type. Think of it as broad match on steroids — it generates roughly 4–6x the search terms of an ordinary broad match on the same query. More volume, more noise, and much harder to keep your account structure clean.
URL targeting. You can mix DSA and keyword targeting in the same ad group. It doesn’t radically change how campaigns work, but it adds another layer of DSA management on top of your existing search setup.
Ad copy generation. Auto-applied recommendations that can generate and update your ad copy.
That’s the whole product. Three things in a trench coat called AI Max.
Using LLMs to filter AI Max search terms in Amanda AI
There’s nothing to configure. AI Max runs as part of your Search campaigns, and Amanda AI handles the cleanup behind it: exact match keywords get added and optimized, mined search terms pass through Claude for landing page relevance before they touch your account, and the noise stays out of your keyword list. URL exclusions, ad group restructuring, and whether to keep AI Max on at all — those are still your calls.
How Amanda AI works with AI Max
Our platform is built to add precision to whatever Google is doing this quarter. As Google pushes broader matching with AI Max, Amanda AI keeps adding and optimizing exact match keywords on your account — so you keep control, transparency, and traceable signals on top of whatever AI Max is doing underneath.
Specifically, here’s what Amanda AI continues to do on accounts running AI Max:
Keyword mining keeps running. Search terms driving traffic to your ads — including the ones generated by AI Max — flow into Amanda AI’s mining pipeline. Anything that meets the Quality Score threshold (default 7 out of 10, configurable per project) becomes a candidate to be added as exact match.
An LLM relevance check sits between the mining pipeline and your account. Each candidate search term goes through Claude, which compares it to the target landing page and rejects anything that isn’t a clean fit before it’s added as a keyword. With AI Max generating 4–6x more search terms, the irrelevant rate climbs fast — adding everything that’s QS-eligible would clutter the account. The LLM pass is what handles that.
Exact match scaffolding stays in place. Because exact match takes priority over broad — and over PMax search themes — in Google’s auction, the keywords Amanda AI adds keep your account anchored on queries you’ve actually qualified, even when AI Max is matching broadly underneath.
Where Google picks up
Worth being clear about where Amanda AI ends and the operator picks up. URL exclusions on AI Max aren’t managed by Amanda AI — if it’s sending traffic to URLs you don’t want, that’s a manual call inside Google Ads. Same for tightening ad group structure to constrain AI Max thematically; that’s still on the operator today.
Ad copy generation is its own thing. Amanda AI generates ad copy from a crawl of your site — that runs independently of anything AI Max is doing. AI Max’s auto-applied recommendations are a separate Google feature on top, managed at the Google Ads level.
What we’re seeing in real accounts
A few things, none of them dramatic.
Spend distribution doesn’t really change when AI Max is enabled. There are a few levers to push more traffic through it, but none of them have produced strong results in our testing.
Performance tends to be slightly lower with AI Max than without it. Not always — there are exceptions where it improves outcomes — but more often than not. The thing that helps most is narrowing the targeting: excluding URLs where you don’t want budget going, and tightening ad group structure.
There’s also a more annoying failure mode worth flagging. AI Max occasionally misinterprets the website entirely and starts dominating the campaign with irrelevant queries. This happens most with smaller businesses that aren’t clearly recognized as a brand or category in Google’s index. Quick sanity check: look up your business in Google Trends. If Google can’t categorize you cleanly, AI Max probably won’t either.
When AI Max is worth running
A rough heuristic from what we’ve seen.
It’s worth testing on accounts where Google clearly recognizes your category, where you have the operational bandwidth to actively manage URL exclusions and ad group structure, and where you’re prioritizing reach over last-percentage-point efficiency.
We’d hold off on accounts with niche or hard-to-categorize businesses, accounts where there’s no time to actively narrow targeting, and accounts where CPA discipline matters more than incremental coverage.
Either way, Amanda AI handles the keyword mining, relevance filtering, and exact match scaffolding the same way. AI Max just changes how much noise the filter has to chew through.
A note on AI Overviews and AI Mode
Yes, they’re eating into traditional search volume. But not as much on commercial queries — yet. The shift is real, just uneven. Wordstream keeps a useful running stat sheet on AI Overview rollout in the US.
