AI Max for Shopping campaigns is a beta suite of features that uses Google AI to optimize your Shopping campaigns and to connect your ads with potential shoppers who are making complex, conversational searches. You can use AI Max for Shopping to help bridge the gap between static ad formats and how people search today.
This article explains the benefits of AI Max for Shopping campaigns: how it works, and where your AI Max for Shopping campaigns will serve.
On this page
- Benefits
- How AI Max for Shopping campaigns works
- About text customization
- About Final URL expansion
- Features available in AI Max for Shopping
- Tracking parameters and AI Max for Shopping: best practices
- Troubleshooting dynamic landing pages
Benefits
- Improve creative relevance: Transform static product data into hyper-relevant, dynamic assets that map to complex long-tail searches and native AI search surfaces.
- Maximize reach and drive performance: Expand assets, ad destinations and formats to capture high-intent traffic from long-tail searches that Shopping campaigns miss.
- Get the control and transparency you need: One-click toggle reduces the burden of manual optimization, while new actionable insights allow you to monitor how AI Max for Shopping is driving performance.
*Source: Google internal data, Global, 2026; for Retail advertisers.
How AI Max for Shopping campaigns works
AI Max for Shopping campaigns offers a comprehensive suite of targeting and creative enhancement – including text customization of your ad copy and final URL expansion to increase the relevance of your landing page to a shopper's intent. You can use both settings or you can choose to use text customization only.
- Text customization: Optimize your ad copy (for example, product titles) to help make them more relevant across Shopping ads and serve on new AI-driven surfaces, like AI Overview. Learn more about text customization and AI Max for Shopping.
- Final URL expansion: Unlock access to text ads powered by your Merchant Center feed and dynamic landing pages, helping you show up for more research-based searches. Learn more about Final URL expansion and AI Max for Shopping.
- Note: Final URL expansion requires text customization to be turned on to ensure ad copy matches the landing page.
- Brand settings
- URL exclusions
- Text guidelines
- Improved retail-centric reporting
About text customization
When you enable text customization, Google AI can dynamically update your product titles to align with shopper search queries and intent. By leveraging content from your Merchant Center feed, this setting automatically generates highly relevant, query-matched product titles predicted to improve your ad performance.
This AI-driven flexibility allows your campaigns to go beyond static feed data, delivering personalized titles at a scale that is impossible to achieve manually.
Benefits
- Ready for next-generation search: Built to perform seamlessly in newer search experiences, such as AI Overview and AI Mode. This ensures that your products don't just appear alongside answers, they directly answer the shopper's query.
- Hyper-relevant titles: Dynamically matches your product titles to specific searches, delivering a level of personalization and relevance that static feed data cannot support.
- Richer utility of feed data: Google AI treats your GMC feed as a deep product database rather than a static list. It extracts key product attributes (such as "waterproof", "stability-focused" or "available for click and collect") to match complex, long-tail queries with high precision.
- Zero-touch optimization: Minimizes the need for manual feed maintenance, custom feed rules or constant adjustments to capture shifting search trends.
How it works
To generate highly relevant titles, we use a combination of extractive techniques based on your existing feed and website content while using generative AI.
To ensure quality and accuracy, every generated title goes through strict guardrails:
- Grounded in your data: Advanced quality models verify that all generated titles are strictly accurate and grounded in your actual product offerings.
- Performance-first logic: Customized titles will only serve if they’re predicted to perform better than the original titles you uploaded. If the system does not predict a performance uplift, your original title will serve.
- Professional formatting: Quality filters ensure that the generated text looks natural, professional and appealing to shoppers.
- Shopping ads can serve rewritten product titles that are more relevant for your shoppers, for example “Mens Shoe SKU 123” might be rewritten as “Men’s Waterproof Hiking Boot”
- Text ads can include Final URL expansion opt-in and can serve AI-driven headlines and descriptions and even product imagery from the feed so that ads are very relevant for your shoppers.
Example
| Original Product Title | Titles that customers see may include... |
|---|---|
| Lounge deep 93" sofa | Lounge deep 93" sofa |
| Made in USA 93" Deep Sofa | |
| Lounge Deep Sofa with Soft Cushions | |
| Lounge deep 93" sofa | Soft cushions |
About Final URL expansion
Final URL expansion advances eligibility beyond basic Shopping ads to text ads. This feature allows your campaign to serve hybrid text and product formats and to capture mid-funnel queries.
How Final URL expansion works
Instead of relying solely on the specific product URLs in your Merchant Center feed, the system crawls your website to identify other high-value "commercial URLs", for example, category pages, "new arrivals", or editorial pages.
Final URL expansion will only send traffic to URLs that are query relevant and themed to your ad group. It also requires text customization to be turned on to ensure ad copy matches the landing page.
Features available in AI Max for Shopping
The following features and settings are included in AI Max for Shopping:
| Text customization |
Uses content from your Merchant Center feed along with generative AI for Google Ads, to dynamically create highly relevant, query-matched product titles predicted to help to improve your ad performance. Campaign level control |
|---|---|
| Final URL expansion |
Crawls your website to identify other high-value "commercial URLs", for example, category pages, "new arrivals" or editorial pages. Send traffic to URLs that are query-relevant and themed to your ad group. Requires text customization to be turned on to ensure ad copy matches landing page. Campaign level control |
| Term exclusions |
Exclude exact words or phrases from all generated assets. Term exclusions aren't case sensitive, and you can add up to 25 term exclusions per campaign to refine your ad. Campaign level control |
| Messaging restrictions |
Specify what concepts, associations or styles to avoid in your assets. You can define the tone of voice to adhere to or avoid in your assets. You can add up to 40 restrictions per campaign to refine your ads. Campaign level control |
| Brand exclusions |
Specify the exact brands you want to prevent your ads from appearing alongside. Campaign level control |
| URL exclusions |
Exclude specific URLs from serving as landing pages in your campaign. Campaign level control |
| Updates to reporting |
AI Max for Shopping includes reporting optimization to help track your campaign’s performance.
|
Tracking parameters and AI Max for Shopping: best practices
For advertisers
AI Max for Shopping helps you dynamically update your product titles to align with shopper search intent and final URL expansion (FUE), which includes using dynamic landing pages that are more relevant to search queries. However, when combined with existing tracking templates, these dynamic URLs can sometimes lead to broken expanded landing pages with a 404 error if the tracking templates aren’t configured in a compatible way.
Best practices for LPURL tags
Tracking templates define how tracking information is appended to your landing page URLs, enabling you to get additional tracking data. FUE introduces landing page automation, which substitutes advertiser-provided URLs with dynamic landing pages.
If your campaign currently uses a tracking template, verify that a dynamic landing page from FUE works on your landing page before enabling AI Max.
Example: When FUE is active and {product_id} is used as a parameter, it will be expanded to an empty string for ads triggered by FUE. If your conversion attribution relies on this parameter, it may lead to inaccurate reporting / attribution.
To avoid landing page errors, ensure that tracking parameters are correctly set from the dynamic landing page. This is particularly important when lpurl tags follow specific common patterns if there are tracking parameters following the landing page:
- {lpurl}?
- {lpurl}&
- {lpurl}#
- {lpurl} (Used if there are no tracking parameters. Using the LPURL tag will ensure that AI Max can use the dynamic landing page)
Transition to a “hybrid URL strategy" using Campaign-Level Tracking Templates. Tracking parameters like {extensionid} and {adgroupid} should be appended to the {lpurl} to maintain granular product-level performance tracking without breaking dynamic routing.
Troubleshooting dynamic landing pages
In some cases, when dynamic landing pages from FUE may not function correctly with tracking templates, these may be the reasons:
- Static tracking URLs: If your tracking template specifies a static URL without any {lpurl} tag (for example, https://www.domain.com/), users may be directed to this static URL instead of a dynamic landing page.
- Non-standard LPURL tag usage: Some less common forms of LPURL tags, other than the recommended ones, can cause 404 errors. For example, if the LPURL tag is only a portion of a URL parameter (like "foo={lpurl}value)"), dynamic landing pages may not work as intended.
