Google and Meta run your ads now. Audit what they turned on

In April 2026 Hayley Owen, a media director at Deutsch, told Marketing Brew that her team plays “Whac-A-Mole” to find new features Meta has turned on without notice. Google is doing much the same on a schedule. It’s upgrading its older Search features into AI Max, with some AI settings on once the upgrade lands.

So the biggest changes in an ad account may be in settings nobody touched. When the platform makes more of the decisions, your job is to know what’s switched on, feed it good inputs and check its claims. Here’s a monthly audit for that, with AI doing the sorting and a person making every call.

What have the platforms changed?

AI Max for Search is, in Google’s words, an optional optimisation layer. It has three parts:

The controls are brand inclusions and exclusions, URL exclusions and locations of interest. The search terms report now has an “AI Max” match type, a source column and a combined view of term, headline and landing URL.

On 15 April 2026 Google said AI Max was leaving beta and older features would upgrade. On 11 June it pushed Dynamic Search Ads back to February 2027. Campaigns using automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match still upgrade from September 2026.

At Google Marketing Live 2026 it also announced three tools: an AI Brief to “steer AI to represent your brand”, Asset Studio for making and testing creative, and an Ask Advisor assistant. There were no availability dates, so check what your account actually has.

Meta’s Advantage+ sales campaigns, by its own description, optimise “your audience, placements and budget automatically”.

In the same April article, Aaron Edwards of The Charles Group said the system rewards several fully distinct creative concepts. He said marketers often misread it as wanting many small variations of one ad. That’s one agency founder’s view, but it matches how I’d brief creative.

Jeremy Schulkin of Hawke Media said Advantage+ now takes 60% to 70% of his agency’s Meta spend. It hasn’t replaced full account structures, he said, and it tends to drift toward low-quality placements.

Meta says advertisers aren’t penalised for opting out of AI features. It says an opt-out of Advantage+ creative is saved as of March 2026. It also says automation does better for most advertisers, though I haven’t seen the method behind that.

Mark Zuckerberg has said advertising could become “as simple as” entering a card number and a goal. A 2025 Wall Street Journal report said that could come as soon as the end of 2026. The marketers quoted in April thought it was much further off.

I’ve left out the ROAS and CPA lifts on agency blogs. They come from the platforms or from people selling services around them.

What stays yours?

The work moves to three places:

My own results came from that work. At Gaba Healthcare, moving 40% of Meta brand spend into search helped take daily qualified calls from 12 to 20. For early-stage clients, fixing the funnel before adding spend cut acquisition cost by 20%.

The monthly audit

1. List what’s switched on. Export this month’s and last month’s settings for every Search and Advantage+ campaign, with the change history. Have AI list every setting that changed, including ones you didn’t change. A marketer then decides, feature by feature, what stays on. Count the surprises each month. Once you have a baseline, that number should fall to zero.

2. Read the search terms AI Max matched. Give AI the search terms report and the combined view. Have it group terms by intent. Have it flag the irrelevant, the competitor-branded and the off-message, plus any landing page that doesn’t fit its term. A person approves each exclusion. Watch the share of spend on terms you’d have picked yourself. Compare cost per conversion on matched terms with your own keywords.

3. Check the copy it wrote. Write one page of what you can and can’t say: prices, guarantees, offers, regulated claims. Have AI flag any served headline that says something not on that page or the landing page. Then fix the landing page, or switch text customisation off for that ad group.

4. Check the signals going in. Each week, match platform-reported conversions against your CRM or ledger. Flag gaps, duplicates and events firing on the wrong action.

Google’s enhanced conversions send hashed customer details, such as an email address, at conversion. Meta’s Conversions API sends your own data alongside the Pixel, and its events must be deduplicated. Where you can, send events close to revenue. Google describes Qualified Future Conversions, announced in 2026, as a way to tie short-term actions to long-term revenue. Read the documentation before relying on it.

5. Brief distinct concepts. Start from what customers actually say in comments, reviews and sales calls. My social listening workflow produces this. Have AI suggest five to eight concepts that differ in angle, audience and promise. A person picks them and an editor checks every claim. Label realistic AI-made images and video where a platform asks. Marketing Brew reports client hesitation about undisclosed AI images.

6. Prove it with an experiment. Run one campaign with and without the AI feature, or hold out one region. AI can draft the plan, the sample size and the readout. A person decides what counts as a win before the test starts.

Google supports one-click experiments for the AI Max upgrade. Meridian, its open-source marketing mix model, can take experiment results as priors. On a small account, a four-week test has wide error bars, and the readout should say so.

The first month

The usual failures:

Week one: record every AI setting in every live campaign, and close the gap between platform and ledger. Week two: run the search term and copy checks. Week three: ship distinct concepts. Week four: start one experiment and write down what would count as a win.

If the platform’s number and the experiment’s disagree, believe the experiment.

Sources