I have been buying paid traffic since 2012. This month is the fourth time a plat
By Michael Erickson Facchin · September 14, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I have been buying paid traffic since 2012. This month is the fourth time a platform has taken a control away from me and called it an upgrade.
Between 1 and 30 September, Google is auto-upgrading Search campaigns that use campaign-level broad match or legacy automatically created assets to AI Max. After the upgrade, matching is looser, headlines can be rewritten, and clicks can land on URLs I did not nominate.
I do not think that is bad. I think most people are preparing for the wrong part of it.
The pattern in the last three waves was identical. Exact match becoming close variants. Manual CPC becoming Smart Bidding. Shopping becoming Performance Max. Each time, the people who lost were not the ones who resisted the automation. They were the ones who had not written down what "working" looked like before the change landed.
You cannot tell whether an upgrade helped if you never captured the before.
So the whole job this month, across my team, is unglamorous. Thirty days of baseline per campaign. Negatives moved to account level. URL exclusions written down. Conversion signals verified. Then let it run and actually look at the difference.
The skill that keeps paying is not manual bidding. It is knowing which number you are defending, and being able to prove what moved it.
That has held for 14 years and two companies. I do not expect this wave to be the exception.