Google yesterday extended the deadline for automatically upgrading Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns to AI Max for Search campaigns, moving the automigration from September 2026 to February 2027 - a five-month delay driven by advertiser feedback - while simultaneously restoring the ability to create new DSA campaigns as of June 15, 2026.

The announcement, published on June 11, 2026 on the Google Ads Developer Blog by Bob Hancock of the Google Ads API Team, carries significant operational weight. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers globally had been tracking a September 2026 hard deadline for the transition. That pressure has now eased - but the direction of travel has not changed.

What changed, and what stayed the same

According to the Google Ads Developer Blog, the automatic upgrade of DSA campaigns to AI Max - or to Search campaigns with broad match and Smart Bidding - has been postponed from September 2026 to February 2027. The second change, effective June 15, 2026, restores the ability to create and edit DSA campaigns, a function that had been curtailed as the platform moved toward deprecation.

"This change is designed to give advertisers additional time to manage their own transitions, perform thorough testing, and ensure a seamless migration to AI Max," according to the Google Ads Developer Blog post.

What has not changed is the ultimate destination. According to Google, the DSA format is still being retired. January 2027 remains the point at which the ability to create new DSA campaigns is removed. February 2027 is when the automigration begins for any remaining active campaigns, at which point they will be automatically upgraded to either Performance Max or AI-powered Search campaigns.

The Google Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, confirmed the extension on X on June 12, 2026. "We're extending the deadline," she wrote. "We've heard your feedback loud and clear: you need more time to transition from Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to AI Max. To give advertisers plenty of runway and not interfere with the busy Q4 period, we are shifting the DSA automigration deadline to February 2027."

The explicit mention of Q4 is notable. The previous September 2026 deadline would have forced many advertisers through a forced migration just as they entered the highest-stakes advertising period of the calendar year, when campaign disruptions carry the largest financial consequences.

The four-phase timeline now in place

According to the updated schedule published by the Google Ads API Team, the transition now unfolds across four distinct phases.

The first phase - immediate, as of June 2026 - restores DSA creation fully. Advertisers can create and edit DSA campaigns without restriction.

The second phase spans June 2026 through January 2027 and is defined as an extended testing and voluntary migration period. During this window, advertisers are expected to manage their own transitions at their own pace.

The third phase, in January 2027, removes the ability to create new DSA campaigns.

The fourth and final phase begins in February 2027, when the automigration kicks in for any active DSA campaigns still remaining. According to Google, those campaigns will be automatically upgraded to Performance Max or AI-powered Search campaigns at that point.

The technical mechanics of migration

For developers managing accounts through the Google Ads API, the announcement includes a query that can be used to audit active DSA campaigns. According to the Developer Blog, the relevant API call queries the campaign resource, filtering for campaigns where campaign.status = 'ENABLED' and campaign.dynamic_search_ads_setting.domain_name IS NOT NULL. The SELECT fields include campaign.id, campaign.name, campaign.status, and campaign.dynamic_search_ads_setting.domain_name from the campaign table.

This matters particularly for agencies and large advertisers who manage accounts programmatically. As previously documented by PPC Land, advertisers or agencies that programmatically create DSA campaigns through API calls need to update their workflows before the final deprecation date. The DSA-to-API dimension was significant in the original April 15 announcement; the delay adds months to that planning window.

When migration does occur, the mechanics are specific. According to Google, DSA campaigns containing dynamic ad groups will transition to standard ad groups. Settings and data are ported into AI Max to maintain consistent performance. All three AI Max features - search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion - will be enabled by default, with legacy URL controls preserved. A parallel-running period is built in: the system generates new Responsive Search Ads and submits them to policy review, and only when those RSAs pass review and become active are the legacy DSAs paused and placed in a view-only state.

For campaigns using Automatically Created Assets (ACA) and campaign-level broad match setting, the timeline did not change. According to Google's updated June 11 post on the Ads and Commerce Blog, "campaigns using Automatically Created Assets (ACA) and campaign-level broad match setting will continue to be auto-upgraded starting in September 2026." The delay applies specifically to DSA. ACA and broad match campaigns remain on the original schedule.

Why the deadline moved

The original DSA-to-AI Max migration was announced on April 15, 2026, when Google simultaneously declared AI Max out of beta and set September 2026 as the automigration date. PPC Land covered that announcement in depth, noting that it marked one of the most structurally significant changes to Google's search advertising platform in years.

What followed was a sustained period of practitioner friction. Advertisers documenting the page-matching gap between DSA and AI Max raised specific, technically grounded complaints - AI Max was routing granular product queries to generic landing pages rather than the precise product pages DSA had handled reliably. Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager, posted a side-by-side comparison on LinkedIn in May 2026 showing that three specific refrigerator-model queries that DSA routed to individual product pages were all landing on a generic manufacturer page under AI Max.

Ginny Marvin, responding in the same LinkedIn thread, wrote: "Yes, I understand what you are saying and the example you shared, and have passed the feedback to the team." That exchange, documented by PPC Land, illustrated the tension between Google's aggregate performance claims and the granular use cases where individual advertisers were encountering problems.

The performance data debate is longer-running. Independent tests published in November 2025, covering more than 250 retail campaigns, found that AI Max delivered conversions at approximately 35% lower return on ad spend compared to traditional match types. A separate analysis by Xavier Mantica found a cost per conversion of $100.37 under AI Max versus $43.97 for phrase match across a four-month testing window. Google, for its part, has revised its headline figure downward since the initial May 2025 launch - from a claim of 14% more conversions to an average of 7% more conversions when using the full feature suite compared to search term matching alone, as covered by PPC Land in the context of the AI Max Shopping expansion.

The voluntary migration path remains open

Google is not simply extending the deadline and asking advertisers to wait. The voluntary upgrade tools released in April 2026 remain available. According to the Developer Blog, these tools allow a one-click transition that preserves historical reporting and minimizes learning-phase disruptions by mapping DSA targets to their modern equivalents. Advertisers can run Campaign Experiments - testing AI Max for Search campaigns with broad match and Smart Bidding against existing DSA campaigns - to measure performance parity before committing.

"Although you now have additional time, we strongly recommend proactively managing your migration rather than waiting for the automatic upgrade in February 2027. Manual migration allows you to tailor your assets and maintain tighter control over your campaign structures," according to the Google Ads Developer Blog.

The restored DSA creation function, effective June 15, 2026, serves a specific purpose within this framework. It gives advertisers a stable baseline to run against while testing AI-powered alternatives - a side-by-side structure that was not cleanly available in the weeks before the delay was announced.

Why this matters for search advertisers

The DSA format has been a structural fixture of Google Search advertising for years. It operates by crawling an advertiser's website, indexing landing-page content, and matching search queries to the page whose content most closely aligns. The system requires no keyword lists; targeting is entirely URL-driven and content-derived. For advertisers managing large catalogs - retailers with thousands of SKUs, travel companies with hundreds of destination pages, publishers with deep content libraries - that landing-page-first logic provided granular control that keyword campaigns could not replicate at scale.

AI Max, which PPC Land has tracked since its beta launch on May 6, 2025, combines landing-page signals with real-time intent signals, ad copy, and audience data. According to Google, those richer inputs produce better outcomes than page-content signals alone. The critical point of disagreement in the practitioner community is whether AI Max can replicate DSA's page-matching precision at the product or category level - or whether the broader input set produces a diffusion of targeting that undermines the granularity that made DSA operationally useful.

The five-month delay does not resolve that question. It creates a longer window for Google to improve AI Max's page-matching mechanics and for advertisers to test the system under controlled conditions before the forced transition. Whether that window is sufficient depends on how much the system changes between now and January 2027.

For accounts using the Google Ads API, the delay also removes time pressure from a technical workflow update. The Google Ads API v24.1, released in May 2026, introduced ADOPT_AI_MAX and ADOPT_BROAD_MATCH_KEYWORDS as formalized experiment types - tools that map directly to the testing methodology Google recommends for this migration. The additional runway makes those experiments more actionable.

The broader context is one of accelerating consolidation. AI Max has been expanding beyond Search: Google brought AI Max to Shopping campaigns in May 2026, and travel ad formats were merged into standard Search campaigns with AI Max in the same period. The DSA migration is one component of a wider architecture shift. Delaying the DSA automigration does not slow the rest of that shift - it simply gives one category of affected advertisers more time to adjust.

What developers should do now

According to the Google Ads Developer Blog, the recommended preparation sequence has three steps. The first is an account audit using the API query described above to identify all active DSA campaigns and ad groups. The second is side-by-side testing, using the restored DSA creation capability as a baseline alongside AI Max Campaign Experiments. The third is a voluntary migration using the upgrade tools in the Google Ads UI - tools that preserve historical reporting and handle the settings mapping automatically.

The API query structure for DSA discovery filters on campaign.dynamic_search_ads_setting.domain_name IS NOT NULL, which surfaces any enabled campaign configured for dynamic search ad targeting regardless of how the campaign was originally set up. For large accounts managed programmatically, this is the fastest way to generate a complete inventory of affected campaigns.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, with the technical announcement authored by Bob Hancock of the Google Ads API Team and the public-facing confirmation from Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin. The change affects all advertisers globally who are running active DSA campaigns or building DSA campaigns programmatically through the Google Ads API.

What: The automatic upgrade of DSA campaigns to AI Max for Search campaigns has been postponed from September 2026 to February 2027. The ability to create new DSA campaigns is restored as of June 15, 2026. The ability to create DSAs will be removed in January 2027, and automigration begins in February 2027 for any campaigns not voluntarily migrated. ACA and campaign-level broad match setting upgrades remain on the original September 2026 schedule.

When: The announcement was published on June 11, 2026 on the Google Ads Developer Blog, with the DSA creation restoration effective June 15, 2026. The new automigration date is February 2027.

Where: The change applies to all Google Ads accounts globally. The announcement was published on the Google Ads Developer Blog and the Google Ads and Commerce Blog. The technical controls are accessible through the Google Ads UI, Google Ads Editor, and the Google Ads API.

Why: According to Google, the extension gives advertisers additional time to manage their own transitions, perform thorough testing, and ensure a seamless migration. The explicit reference to not interfering with the Q4 period in Ginny Marvin's confirmation suggests the September deadline was creating operational risk for advertisers whose most critical campaigns run October through December. The broader background includes sustained practitioner feedback about AI Max's page-matching performance relative to DSA, documented in public LinkedIn threads and independent testing studies.