AI Max for Shopping campaigns is a beta suite of features that uses Google AI to optimise your Shopping campaigns and to connect your ads with potential customers who are making complex, conversational searches. You can use AI Max for Shopping to help bridge the gap between static ad formats and how customers search today.
This article explains the benefits of AI Max for Shopping campaigns: how it works, the differences between AI Max for Shopping and Search, and where your AI Max for Shopping campaigns will serve.
On this page
- Benefits
- How AI Max for Shopping campaigns works
- About text customisation
- About final URL expansion
- Differences between AI Max for Shopping and Search campaigns
Benefits
- Enhance creative relevance: Transform static product data into hyper-relevant, dynamic assets that map to complex long-tail searches and native AI search surfaces.
- Maximise reach and drive performance: Expand assets, ads 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 optimisation, 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 customisation of your ad copy and final URL expansion to increase the relevance of your landing page to a customer's intent. You can use both settings or you can choose to use text customisation only.
- Text customisation: Optimise 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 customisation 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 customisation to be turned on to ensure ad copy matches the landing page.
- Brand settings
- URL exclusions
- Text guidelines
- Improved retail-centric reporting
About text customisation
When you enable text customisation, Google AI can dynamically update your product titles to align with customer 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 personalised 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 customer's query.
- Hyper-relevant titles: Dynamically matches your product titles to specific user searches, delivering a level of personalisation 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 optimisation: Minimises 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: Customised 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 customers, 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 customers.
Example
| Original product title | Titles that customers see may include... |
|---|---|
| Lounge deep 3 seater sofa | Lounge deep 3 seater sofa |
| Made in Australia deep 3-seat sofa | |
| Lounge deep sofa with soft cushions | |
| Lounge deep 3 seater 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 customisation to be turned on to ensure that ad copy matches the landing page.
Differences between AI Max for Shopping and Search campaigns
AI Max for Shopping and AI Max for Search offer complementary value for retailers. Access to the additional formats (for example, text ads powered by feed data) and feed-based creative optimisation are the primary incremental benefits of AI Max for Shopping.
Performance Max remains the most suitable AI-powered campaign for driving performance across all Google inventory. Performance Max (with GMC feed) already supports feed-powered final URL expansion capabilities via text ads, while product title optimisation will be coming to both Performance Max and Shopping campaigns simultaneously.
