Aaron Young shows a client account where AI Max was accidentally enabled and tanked performance over five weeks. 83% of the search terms it triggered would've been caught by existing keywords anyway, and 100% of conversions happened without it. He argues AI Max doesn't deliver the promised growth.
It's May 2026, and this is the number one reason why I'm not using AOMAX inside of Google Ads. And the reason is, is because AOMAX is not delivering the incremental growth which is currently being promised. This is a real account which I'm going to show you, and the owner didn't know that they had accidentally turned on AOMAX at the start of March, and they started to see a drop in their results. And as you can see through here, when we look at the search terms, you can see that AOMAX was starting to spend inside of their account. And here's the real data that you need to look at. In the 5-week period that AOMAX was running, 83% of all the search terms that were triggered by AOMAX would've actually been triggered by their current keyword structure, which was 2 broad match keywords and 3 exact match keywords. And then the biggest part from that is 100% of all of the conversions would've been triggered with their existing keyword structure. And this is my biggest problem with AOMAX right now in May of 2026, in that in most cases, businesses do not need to be using AOMAX yet because they've still got so much more incremental lift that they can get just by increasing their budgets. And then if they can't do that any further in search, they can then go through and add in some segmentation or even start reaching out to campaigns like Performance Max.
