Brandon Ervin, Director of Product Management for Google Search Ads, recently discussed campaign consolidation, AI Max, and what advertiser control looks like in 2026 on Google’s Ads Decoded podcast. The conversation was serious and informed, and reflected a product team that understands advertiser concerns and is actively working to address them.
But the podcast is also incomplete. The gap between what Google said and what advertisers actually experience from their sales organization is large enough to warrant a direct response.
Ervin’s team is doing genuinely good work, but the platform’s structural incentives haven’t changed. Google’s evolving product is creating problems faster than it can solve them. Performance is now measured on economic standards, shaping how a search ads audit is performed.
Recent improvements to Google Search Ads
Recentish improvements are genuine:
- Brand exclusions in Performance Max and Demand Gen.
- Site visitor and customer exclusions from PMax campaigns.
- Network-level reporting within bundled campaigns.
- Improved search term visibility.
- Brand and geo controls inside AI Max at the ad group level.
- Semantic modeling that doesn’t anchor on campaign or ad group IDs, reducing learning period risk during consolidation.
These are meaningful. They are also solutions to issues introduced by bundling, opacity, and aggressive automation rollout.
These products have been mercilessly shopped to advertisers since 2021, and the controls that make it usable arrived years after the sales push began.
The ability to separate brand from non-brand traffic inside PMax/AI Max should not be framed as innovation. It restores a fundamental distinction that previously existed by default. The ability to see network performance inside a bundled campaign is not an expansion of control. It restores visibility that was removed.
An audit must ask whether new tools are genuinely expanding control or merely reintroducing baseline transparency.
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Table stakes: What everyone agrees on
Before the real audit begins, the fundamentals. These are uncontroversial and should already be in place:
- Run full ad extensions (sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, image, call).
- Use automated bidding with intentional target-setting and conversion action selection (I recognize there are still holdouts here but seems crazy to me).
- Maintain negative keyword lists.
- Write ads relevant to the queries they serve.
- Audit automatically created assets for accuracy and brand safety.
- Cut Search Partners and Display expansion from Search campaigns.
- Separate brand and generic campaigns using brand controls.
- Exclude site visitors…
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