Google announced a number of updates to Google Ads at Think Retail yesterday, including the global rollout of AI Max for Search campaigns, new Google Merchant Center features, AI updates to Asset Studio, and more.
(1) AI Max: Google said that all advertisers globally can now use AI Max for Search campaigns. AI Max is a beta available globally now, with anyone able to try it out on their Search campaigns. Google did tell us this would come to all advertisers in Q3, and they did it.
AI Max will also be available not just in the Google Ads web console but also in Google Ads Editor, Search Ads 360, and through the Google Ads API.
Here is a video they shared:
Part of this is rolling out one click experiments with AI Max.
Here is a video of the experiments:
(2) Text guidelines: Google also announced text guidelines, “a new feature to help you create even more brand-safe creative, steering Google AI to create high-performing text assets.” This is available both AI Max and Performance Max campaigns and will roll out to more advertisers over time this Fall.
Text guidelines is a campaign-level feature that allows you to refine your brand’s message for assets made exclusively with text customization. These guidelines help you not only to meet business and brand requirements, but also to control the output of assets created with Google AI automatically when text customization is “ON”.
Here is a video of this feature:
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, wrote on X:
There are two ways to refine the text in your generated assets:
Term exclusions: Add up to 25 exact words or phrases that you want excluded. Never want to see “cheap” used in your generated assets? Just add it as a term exclusion!
Message restrictions: Use natural language to specify concepts, associations or styles to avoid in your text assets.
For example, saying “Don’t imply our products are discounted,” would help ensure terms like discount, cheap, bargain and phrases associated with “discounted” don’t appear in your asset.
You can add up to 40 restrictions per campaign.
More on how this works in this help document.
(3) Google Merchant Center: New AI-powered insights will show up in Google Merchant Center with “actionable tips to help retailers stay ahead of shifts in demand,” Google wrote.
Google is also expanding creative features for Product Studio including the abilty to swap out product scenes at scale, change images to engaging video and proactively suggest timely campaign concepts for your brand.
I wonder where the loyalty goals are, I suspect it is part of the AI-powered insights?
More from the release: pic.twitter.com/nRxRpCdFMv
— Kirk Williams (@PPCKirk) September 10, 2025
(4) Asset Studio: Google will release a new suite of generative Al tools in Asset Studio in the coming weeks. Plus, Asset generation in Performance Max and Demand Gen is soon to be powered by Imagen 4, Google added.
(5) Campaign budgets expansion: Google Ads is expanding campaign total budgets from Demand Gen and Youtube campaigns to include Search, Performance Max and Shopping campaigns.
With this feature, you can now set a start date, end date and a total budget for key shopping periods between 3 to 90 days. Google Ads will then use AI to automatically work to maximize your performance and utilize your budget when it sees customer demand is at its peak, Google wrote.
🗓️ Scenario: You’ve got a sale ready to promote in a specific time & a fixed budget to do it with.
✅ Solution: Choose “Campaign total budget” when setting up your Google Ads campaign to just that.
🥳 Good news: Campaign total budgets are expanding from Demand Gen and YouTube…
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) September 10, 2025
Forum discussion at X.
