DSAs Are Sunsetting: Your AI Max Migration Plan

Dynamic Search Ads are ending, and unusually for a Google deprecation, the ending has a published schedule and a pushed-back deadline — which means you currently hold the thing deprecations rarely offer: time to migrate on your own terms. Use it. A DSA campaign that reaches February 2027 untouched gets converted anyway, in bulk, configured by defaults instead of by you.

The official timeline, as it stands

Date	What happens
Apr 2026	AI Max reaches GA; voluntary DSA upgrade tools begin rolling out
Jun 15, 2026	DSA creation restored for the transition window
Sep 2026	Auto-created assets and campaign-level broad match fold into AI Max
Jan 2027	Ability to create DSAs removed
Feb 2027	Remaining active DSA campaigns begin auto-upgrading

Context worth keeping: the auto-upgrade was originally scheduled for September 2026 and moved to February 2027 after advertiser pushback — Google explicitly sparing accounts a forced migration during Q4. Read that two ways at once: the dates can shift again, and the direction never does. A delay is breathing room, not a reprieve, and treating it as a cancellation is how accounts end up in the bulk queue. Plan against the schedule; verify it quarterly. The broader 2026 picture sits in what actually changed this year.

What DSAs did that AI Max does differently

DSAs were a bargain with a specific shape: point Google at your site or page feed, and it matched queries to landing pages and wrote headlines, inside a campaign type built for exactly that. AI Max absorbs the idea — keywordless matching driven by your landing pages — but repackages it as a feature suite on Search campaigns, alongside keywords rather than instead of them.

Three differences decide your migration work. Targeting grammar: DSA targets — page feeds, categories, URL rules — become AI Max's URL inclusion and exclusion controls, and the mapping is where mistakes hide. Creative control: DSA's generated headlines become AI Max text customisation, steerable with text guidelines you now need to write. Blast radius: DSA was contained in its own campaigns; AI Max features attach to Search campaigns you may also run keywords in, so a sloppy migration can leak into structures DSAs never touched.

Reporting shifts with the mechanism. DSA reporting was organised around its own grammar — search terms joined to the landing pages Google chose — which made "which pages earn paid traffic" a one-report question. Under AI Max the same information exists but arrives through the campaign's general reporting surfaces, alongside keyword traffic. Plan for the first month of readouts to need new prompts rather than old habits, and keep the exported DSA baseline as the translation key between the two worlds.

Inventory first: find every DSA dependency

Migration effort is proportional to what your DSAs actually do, which most accounts have not looked at in years. One prompt builds the inventory:

Find every DSA campaign and ad group in the account. For each: spend, conversions and cost per conversion over the last 12 months; the page feeds or dynamic ad targets in use; every URL exclusion; attached negative keyword lists; and the top 50 search terms with conversions. Flag DSA queries that overlap keywords elsewhere in the account, and export the whole thing as my pre-migration baseline.

The overlap flag matters most. Years of DSA harvesting usually conceal a stable core of converting queries that deserve to become real keywords regardless of what happens to the campaign type — promoting them first shrinks what the migration has to get right. The inventory also sizes the project honestly: an account where DSAs are a low-spend long-tail catcher can migrate in an afternoon, while one where DSAs quietly became the top conversion driver — more common than owners expect — deserves the full staged treatment and a sceptical look at why the keyword coverage never caught up.

The deliberate migration, in order

1. Export the baseline. The inventory above, saved outside the account. Post-migration comparisons need a fixed point.
2. Promote the proven core. Converting DSA queries become exact or phrase keywords in the right ad groups, with ads written against them.
3. Rebuild the fences. URL exclusions carry your intent: careers, support, out-of-stock and legal pages must be excluded in AI Max before it can route traffic. Same for negative lists — attach, do not assume.
4. Write text guidelines. DSA generated headlines with no brief from you; AI Max at least accepts instructions. Banned claims, required qualifiers, tone — write them before the system writes anything.
5. Upgrade one campaign in the voluntary window. Use the in-product upgrade path on your mid-stakes DSA campaign first — not the biggest, not a token — and run it against the baseline for 30 days.
6. Then do the rest, applying what the first told you, finishing before January turns the queue into February's default conversion.

The first 30 days post-upgrade: what to watch

AI Max succeeds or embarrasses in three places, so the watchlist is short and weekly:

• Query drift — expanded matching versus your DSA-era terms; the weekly policing prompt with drafted negatives applies unchanged.
• Destination drift — which URLs traffic actually lands on, checked against your exclusion intent; URL expansion is the feature most likely to surprise.
• Economics against baseline — cost per conversion versus the exported DSA numbers, judged at 30 days, not at 3.

Each check is a read; each fix — a negative, an exclusion, a guideline tightened — is one approved write. An account that runs this loop owns its upgrade.

If you do nothing: what the forced upgrade changes

The do-nothing scenario is worth stating concretely, because it is the default and defaults deserve prices. In February 2027 your remaining DSA campaigns convert on Google's mapping, configured by the migration's defaults rather than your decisions. Nobody exports a baseline, so the before-and-after argument is unwinnable either way. Your URL exclusions and negatives carry only as well as the automated mapping carries them — probably fine, verified by no one. Text runs on default behaviour until someone notices a headline worth objecting to. And all of it lands in the month after Q4, when attention is scarcest and the year's comparisons are already muddy.

None of that is catastrophe; it is compounded carelessness — the same features you would have adopted anyway, minus the fences, the baseline and the first month of watching. Given that the watching now costs a weekly prompt, the do-nothing discount is no longer worth what it used to be.

If your account still runs DSAs, the decision has been made for you; only the manner is left, and the manner is worth real money: the deliberate path costs a few working sessions spread over a quarter, while the February path costs whatever the defaults get wrong in the month nobody was watching. Start the inventory this week, migrate inside the window — and if AI Max itself is still an open question for your non-DSA campaigns, the opt-in decision framework is the companion read.