Google has changed its documentation for Performance Max to say that the campaign type may filter out navigational and brand-specific search queries, leaving them to dedicated Search campaigns that give advertisers more precise control.

The new wording sits on the Google Ads Help page "How Performance Max interacts with other campaigns in your account." PPC News Feed reported the change on November 2, 2026, and credited Hana Kobzová with spotting it. The help page carries no date or change note, and neither the page nor the PPC News Feed report points to a Google announcement. When the sentence first went live, and whether the system behaviour changed at the same moment as the text, is therefore not established.

In Short

Google's help pages now say Performance Max campaigns may skip searches for brand names, and searches where people are trying to reach a specific company or site, so that separate Search campaigns can handle them. That matters for any advertiser who has relied on Performance Max to pick up brand traffic, because Google now says those queries belong in campaigns with tighter controls. Google's page says brand Search campaigns need enough budget and eligible ads to catch that traffic, but it gives no date, no definition of a brand query and no explanation of what happens in accounts that have no such campaign.

What the page says

The passage is three sentences long. According to Google, "Performance Max campaigns may also filter out navigational or brand-specific search queries to prioritize serving them through dedicated Search campaigns. This ensures brand-related queries are handled by campaigns offering more precise control." The bullet then continues: "To capture this traffic, ensure your dedicated brand Search campaigns have sufficient budget and high-quality, eligible ads, and consider adding Search Themes to the Performance Max campaign."

Three details stand out. The verb is "may," not "will," so Google describes a possibility rather than a fixed rule, and it gives no conditions under which the filtering applies. The scope is wider than a company's own name: navigational queries, typically searches by people trying to reach a particular website or business, are named alongside brand-specific ones. And the recommendation has two halves that point in different directions - one toward budget for a separate Search campaign, the other toward the Performance Max campaign itself.

PPC News Feed's summary of the page follows the same lines. According to PPC News Feed, the change "ensures that brand-related queries are managed by campaigns offering more precise control," and the updated page "advises advertisers to ensure their brand Search campaigns have adequate budgets and high-quality ads to capture this filtered traffic."

Where the bullet sits

The brand sentence is the second of two exceptions to Google's general rule for overlapping campaigns. Because Performance Max can serve on all of Google's properties - Google Shopping, Google Images and YouTube are the examples the page gives - it can overlap with existing campaigns that have the same conversion goals, bidding targets and other settings.

When that happens, according to Google, Performance Max interacts with other campaigns in the same way any two campaigns on shared inventory would. Where several campaigns could serve the same impression, Google Ads prioritizes the one with the highest Ad Rank. The page says the rule covers campaigns in one account and in "accounts marked as equivalent," a status it says advertisers can arrange through Google support, and that it exists so campaigns from the same advertiser do not compete against each other and drive up bids. Demand Gen campaigns follow the same logic: when they and Performance Max could serve the same impression, the higher Ad Rank wins.

The first exception covers keywords. A Search campaign with a keyword that exactly matches or is spell-corrected to a person's query is preferred over Performance Max. Google illustrates it with the misspelled search "plumbrs." If an account holds the exact match keyword [plumbers] and the broad match keyword plumbrs, the exact match keyword is preferred. If no keyword across match types exactly matches the query, the campaign with the higher Ad Rank serves.

The brand bullet comes straight after. The page also notes that Performance Max does not support campaigns with App installs as a goal; Google recommends App campaigns for installs.

From keyword rules to a query category

The difference between the two exceptions is the trigger. The keyword exception depends entirely on what an advertiser has built. An account with an exact match brand keyword sends that brand query to Search; an account without one leaves the decision to Ad Rank, where Performance Max can win. The new bullet adds a route that does not depend on keyword coverage at all. Performance Max itself may step back from a query because of what the query is - a brand or navigational search - rather than because a matching keyword exists elsewhere in the account.

Earlier descriptions of Google's ordering had no such category. In May, Google's Help Center set out a four-level hierarchy: exact match keywords identical to the search term first, phrase and broad match keywords identical to the term second, AI-based ad group prioritization third and Ad Rank as the tie-breaker. When Google told advertisers it would convert broad match campaigns to AI Max from September 1, the ordering described at the time placed Performance Max search themes identical to the search term in the second tier. Neither version contained a category for brand or navigational intent.

Microsoft documented a simpler rule for its own version of the product. In December 2025, Microsoft Advertising said an exact match keyword in a Search campaign always takes priority over Performance Max, regardless of Ad Rank, with Ad Rank deciding every other case. Microsoft's rule, like Google's first exception, turns on the keyword and not on the type of query.

What the page does not say

For a change that affects how brand traffic is allocated, the page leaves a good deal unexplained.

Google does not define a navigational or brand-specific query. Nor does it say whether "brand" means the advertiser's own brand, a competitor's brand or any brand name Google recognizes. Google does maintain a catalogue of brand names elsewhere: when branded search controls appeared inside AI Max in late May, one of the three options let advertisers avoid all brand names known to Google, a setting Google itself flagged as highly restrictive. Whether the Performance Max filter draws on the same list is not stated.

The question matters most for retailers. For a store selling other companies' products, a search for a manufacturer's name is often a product search. Google has treated that case separately before: when it wrapped up its 2025 Performance Max rollouts, the list included brand exclusions for different formats in retailer campaigns with product feeds, with separate handling for Search text ads and Shopping ads. Microsoft is moving the same way. Its October 28 product update said it was refining brand exclusions so advertisers could apply them to text ads only while still appearing on brand searches with product ads. Google's help page does not say whether its filtering covers Shopping inventory, YouTube search or only text ads on Google Search.

Then there is the account with no brand Search campaign. Google's phrasing - "to capture this traffic, ensure your dedicated brand Search campaigns have sufficient budget" - implies the traffic is not automatically served by the advertiser when that campaign is missing or short of budget. The page does not say whether Performance Max keeps serving brand queries in that situation, or whether those impressions simply go unserved by that advertiser.

Other gaps are more basic. The page describes no setting to switch the behaviour on or off. It mentions no report or label showing which queries were filtered. It gives no figures on how many queries are affected, and no effective date.

The search themes puzzle

The final clause of Google's recommendation is the hardest to read. Search themes are signals, not keywords. Google introduced them for Performance Max in October 2023, allowing up to 25 per asset group while the feature was in beta, and doubled the limit to 50 in May 2025, when themes were described as signals prioritized much like phrase or broad match keywords in Search campaigns, adding to rather than restricting the queries Performance Max would reach.

Google's page does not explain how adding search themes would help "capture this traffic" if the traffic in question is brand traffic that Performance Max may filter out. If a search theme contains a brand name and is identical to a user's query - the case the August description of keyword priority placed in the second tier - does the theme keep the query inside Performance Max, or does the brand filter override it? The page is silent. A plausible reading is that the advice concerns the non-brand demand Performance Max keeps, but Google does not say so, and the sentence joins both recommendations in a single instruction.

Why brand traffic in Performance Max has been contested

Brand queries inside Performance Max have been a recurring source of friction, and Google has shipped a series of controls aimed at them.

In February 2024, the two main options then available were account-level negative keywords, which blocked branded queries in every campaign including unrelated ones, and campaign-level brand exclusions, which applied to specific campaigns and covered variations of a brand name. In March 2025, Google raised the Performance Max negative keyword limit from 100 to 10,000, with the keywords applying to Search and Shopping inventory only. By August 2025, negative keyword lists had arrived as well, with up to 5,000 keywords per list and 20 lists per account. Later that month, brand exclusion lists expanded across all match types and Dynamic Search Ads, ending a period in which they had been limited to Performance Max. In November 2025, Google Ads Editor 2.11 added search term reports for Performance Max, giving advertisers another way to see which queries the campaigns were matching.

Microsoft built its own tools along similar lines. In July 2024, Microsoft Advertising introduced brand lists for Performance Max, with up to 20 lists per account and an editorial review for new brands that typically took four to six weeks.

The economic argument came into sharper focus in April 2026, when advertisers questioned whether Performance Max holds up above $100,000 a month. Google's Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, pointed in that debate to brand exclusions as the control that stops Performance Max from targeting branded search, Shopping and YouTube search queries. A Haus analysis from August 2024, cited in that debate, found that excluding brand terms lowered customer acquisition costs in every experiment tested, by an average of 40%. The incrementality picture was more mixed: where exclusion was the better strategy it produced 24% more incremental revenue, while in half of the tests including brand terms produced more incremental revenue.

Branded searches also carry weight in Google's own measurement. In June 2026, Google tied each additional branded search generated after an ad impression or view to an average $31 increase in sales, a figure attached to its Attributed Branded Searches metric. Google presents branded searches as a measurable outcome of its video advertising; which campaign is allowed to serve those searches is a separate question that the help page now answers only in part.

What changes for advertisers

The practical effect depends on account structure. For advertisers who already run a brand Search campaign, Google's new text describes the split those accounts already use: brand demand handled in a campaign with keyword-level reporting and bid controls, and Performance Max kept for everything else. For advertisers who have let Performance Max absorb brand traffic, the description signals a possible shift in where those conversions are recorded, and potentially in the reported results of the Performance Max campaign itself, since brand queries tend to come from people already looking for the company.

The AI Max branded search controls offer a comparison. There, Google put the choice in a visible setting with three options and its own warning text. For Performance Max, the equivalent behaviour arrives as one sentence on a help page, with "may" doing a lot of work and no setting attached.

Whether Google confirms the change, dates it or adds a report showing filtered queries will determine how much advertisers can verify. For now, the evidence consists of a help page bullet and a sighting reported by PPC News Feed, with no data from Google on how often Performance Max steps aside.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, which publishes the Google Ads Help page on how Performance Max interacts with other campaigns, and advertisers running Performance Max alongside or instead of brand Search campaigns. PPC News Feed reported the change, crediting Hana Kobzová.

What: Google's help page now says Performance Max campaigns may filter out navigational and brand-specific search queries so that dedicated Search campaigns serve them. The page tells advertisers to give brand Search campaigns sufficient budget and eligible ads and to consider adding search themes to Performance Max. It does not define brand queries, describe a setting, give figures or say what happens in accounts without a brand Search campaign.

When: PPC News Feed reported the change on November 2, 2026. The help page carries no date, and Google has not dated the change.

Where: In Google Ads, on search queries that Performance Max campaigns could otherwise serve. The help page does not say whether Shopping ads, YouTube search or only Google Search text ads are affected.

Why: Google says brand-related queries should be handled by campaigns offering more precise control. The change bears on a long-running dispute over Performance Max claiming brand traffic, which Google had previously addressed through negative keywords and brand exclusions rather than an automatic filter.