The edit surfaced on September 4, 2026, when Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable spotted a change to the help centre page titled About Performance Max for store goals. There was no blog post. There was no product announcement, no named executive, and no supporting data. The entire evidence of the expansion consists of a paragraph that reads differently than it did before, and a bullet list of country names appended beneath it.

The earlier version of the page confined the placement to a single market. It stated that "Waze Ads are currently available only in the United States through Performance Max for store goal campaigns bidding to Store Visits, Store Sales, or Local Actions Directions."

The replacement drops the geographic restriction and defers to a list. According to the current documentation, "Waze Ads are currently available across select global markets through Performance Max for store goals campaigns bidding on Store Visits, Store Sales, or Local Actions Directions. Supported countries are listed below:"

Forty-two entries follow. One of them is the United States, which means 41 markets were added.

The countries on the list

The geographic shape of the expansion is lopsided, and the imbalance is informative.

Europe accounts for 32 of the 42 markets. Every one of the 27 European Union member states appears: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway are also listed, which completes the EEA at 30 states. The United Kingdom and Switzerland bring the European count to 32.

The Americas contribute seven markets: the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile. Asia-Pacific contributes two, Australia and Malaysia. The Middle East contributes one, Israel, which is where Waze was founded and where the application has historically held unusually deep penetration.

What is missing carries as much weight as what is present. Japan is absent. India is absent. So are South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, New Zealand, and every market in Africa. Waze operates in most of those territories as a consumer product. The advertising layer, on this list, does not follow it there.

The pattern points at regulatory and commercial infrastructure rather than at user numbers. Markets where Google already runs mature local advertising machinery, billing entities and store visit measurement are in. Markets where that plumbing is thinner, or where privacy regimes have not been mapped to the placement, are not.

What a Waze advertisement actually is

The format is narrow, and the documentation is unusually concrete about it. Google describes the unit as a branded square pin that sits on a driver's route. Tapping it opens details including location and directions. The page states that the business "appears as a branded square pin on a user's driving route," and that the promoted place pin appears along the route, inviting a stop.

There is no video. There is no carousel. There is no headline auction against a query. The creative is a logo on a map, served to a person who is currently moving through physical space toward somewhere else. Google frames the value as timing rather than volume, describing Waze as connecting with drivers in real time while they are on route or exploring nearby destinations.

Inside Performance Max, the placement carries the label Promoted Places. Businesses appeared as sponsored pins labelled Promoted Places in Navigation when Google first added Waze inventory to store goals campaigns in the United States on November 6, 2025, an addition that required no extra creative work because the campaign type pulls from assets already in the account.

Two statements about bidding, and they do not match

The documentation describes the eligibility condition twice, in two places, using two different formulations. The discrepancy is worth reporting rather than smoothing over.

The country note, the one that changed, says availability runs through store goals campaigns "bidding on Store Visits, Store Sales, or Local Actions Directions." Read plainly, that is a list of three qualifying goals, any one of which suffices.

The body of the Waze section says something narrower. It states that store goals campaigns include Promoted Places on Waze, and that this "is available when bidding on local actions (directions), either exclusively or alongside store visits or sales."

Under the second formulation, local actions directions is not one option among three. It is the required goal, which may be run alone or in combination with the other two. A campaign bidding purely to store visits would qualify under the first sentence and fail under the second. Google has not published a clarification, and the two sentences sit on the same page.

The rest of the store goals surface

Waze is one of seven surfaces the campaign type buys. The documentation lists Google Maps, Waze, the Google Search Network, YouTube, the Google Display Network, Business Profiles and Gmail.

Maps carries the largest inventory range. Four formats are named: promoted pins, map search ads, map suggest ads and placesheet ads. Map suggest ads are the least familiar of the four. The documentation gives a worked example in which a user types the first three characters of movies, m-o-v, and a theatre location near that user appears inside the autocomplete suggestions before the query has been completed.

One constraint is stated flatly. According to the page, "Currently, you can't serve ads exclusively in Google Maps." The same logic applies structurally to Waze: the placement is not separately buyable, and it arrives as part of a bundle governed by automated allocation.

Local promotions attach through promotion assets, which can be set at account level or campaign level, with campaign-level assets overriding account-level ones. A further restriction governs redemption formats. The documentation states that "QR code and Barcode promotions don't serve on Search, Shorts, or In-stream video ads. They only serve on Maps."

Location definition happens through a linked Business Profile or through affiliate locations. Radius targeting is either set inside the campaign or determined automatically, and the automatic radius depends on the targeted locations and on a user's preference of travel distance. Three additional factors are named as inputs to that calculation: vertical, population density and existing competitors. Google Ads has previously discouraged layering conventional geographic targets on top of that mechanism, warning that additional geo targets in store goals campaigns can reach irrelevant audiences.

Ten months from one market to forty-two

The sequence is short and traceable. Waze advertising relaunched in the United States in July 2025. In November 2025 it moved onto the Google Ads platform inside Performance Max, arriving alongside the general availability of channel performance reporting. Google said at the time that international expansion would follow during 2026 but declined to name markets.

The intervening months filled in the surrounding architecture rather than the geography. Channel-level reporting reached the Google Ads API with version 23 in January 2026, replacing a generic mixed enumeration with named channels. In April 2026, a Google video series described a variant called PMax on the go, running exclusively on local formats across Maps, Waze and Search, and put the addressable audience at more than a billion people visiting Maps and Search each month to find businesses or locate destinations mid-journey.

At Google Marketing Live on May 20, 2026, Google added Maps as a Demand Gen placement with Promoted Pins, extending navigational inventory beyond the store goals campaign type into Demand Gen. In July 2026, Waze itself gained Gemini-powered voice destination search and a set of driver-facing features, none of which changed how the advertising worked but all of which deepened the query surface inside the application.

Then the documentation changed, and 41 markets appeared.

The reporting question the note does not answer

An advertiser in Munich or Sao Paulo running a store goals campaign from September 2026 onward now has Waze in the eligible pool. What that advertiser can see, and control, is less clear.

Performance Max has no ad groups and no ads. Budget allocation across surfaces is decided by the system. Channel reporting exists, and has since 2025, but the documentation change says nothing about whether Waze surfaces as a discrete named channel in those reports or is folded into a broader local bucket. Nor does it state whether spend attribution differs between a promoted pin served during active navigation and a placesheet advertisement served in Maps.

Control is similarly unresolved. Google has been testing an alpha that lets selected advertisers pick partner networks inside Performance Max, a capability that did not exist through the standard interface as of May 2026. Absent that, an advertiser in one of the 41 new markets who does not want driver-facing inventory has no documented campaign-level switch to remove it.

Nothing in the note addresses pricing, minimum spend, auction dynamics against Waze's existing direct-sold advertisers, or whether store visit measurement in the newly added markets meets the same thresholds it does in the United States. Measurement is not a footnote here. Store visits and store sales are estimated conversions, and the accuracy of footfall attribution varies materially by market according to device panel density and local privacy rules. A campaign optimising toward an estimate behaves according to the quality of that estimate.

The help page itself hints at the confusion the change is likely to produce. Among the sample questions Google's own artificial intelligence summary offers on the page is one that reads: is Waze advertising available for my store locations in Germany.

Why this matters for marketers

Paid density inside local results has been climbing sharply, and this expansion pushes it further into a surface that carried almost no advertising in most of these countries a year ago.

The trajectory is documented. Local pack advertisements rose from under 3% of tracked keywords in early November 2025 to roughly 22% by January 2026, a 733% increase measured by local search consultant Joy Hawkins across 1,200 mobile ranking reports using Places Scout data. That measurement was United States focused. European local advertisers have not yet seen an equivalent documented shift, and the arrival of Waze inventory across 32 European markets is one of the mechanisms by which such a shift would occur.

Consolidation is running in parallel. Local Services Ads began folding into Google Ads from August 2026, with non-United States accounts scheduled to transition in 2027. The direction is toward a single automated buying object that spans Search, Maps, Waze and Business Profiles, with fewer manual levers underneath it.

Competitive pressure supplies the other half of the picture. Apple has been building local advertising inventory on its own terms, announcing Apple Business on March 24, 2026 and launching it across more than 200 countries on April 14, 2026, before opening Maps advertisement buying in the United States and Canada. Apple Maps campaigns remain confined to two countries. Waze inventory, as of this documentation change, is listed in 42. For a European multi-location retailer, that asymmetry is the practical difference between one navigational advertising option and none.

The mechanics of the placement also sit awkwardly with how most local budgets are evaluated. A branded pin on a driving route generates no click to a website and no form fill. Its value proposition rests on a detour that ends in a physical building, measured by an estimated conversion. Advertisers in 41 new markets acquired that inventory this week without asking for it, and without a documented way to decline it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, through an unannounced revision to the Google Ads help centre page About Performance Max for store goals. The change was identified by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. It affects advertisers running store goals campaigns in 41 markets outside the United States, along with the agencies managing those accounts and the multi-location retailers, restaurant groups and service businesses that buy local inventory.

What: Waze advertising inventory, previously restricted to the United States, is now documented as available in 42 countries through Performance Max for store goals campaigns. The format is a branded square pin appearing on a driver's route, opening to location and directions details when tapped. Eligibility is tied to bidding on store visits, store sales or local actions directions, though the page states that condition in two mutually inconsistent ways. No pricing, reporting granularity, minimum spend, or opt-out mechanism was published alongside the change.

When: The documentation change was reported on September 4, 2026. Waze advertising relaunched in the United States in July 2025 and moved into Performance Max on November 6, 2025, at which point Google indicated international expansion during 2026 without naming markets.

Where: Forty-two countries. Thirty-two are in Europe, covering all 27 European Union member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Seven are in the Americas, two in Asia-Pacific, and one, Israel, in the Middle East. Japan, India, South Korea, Turkey, New Zealand and all African markets are absent.

Why: The expansion extends Google's local advertising surface into navigation across the large majority of European markets at a moment when paid density inside local results has been rising steeply and when Apple has begun assembling a competing Maps advertising product. It also enlarges the pool of inventory allocated automatically by a campaign type that gives buyers no documented channel-level exclusion, meaning inventory was added to live campaigns without an advertiser action and without a documented route to remove it.