PPC | GOOGLE ADS | AI | AIMAX | How much of your Google Ads conversions come from AI Max?
Article by Armen Sargsyan Combine AI Max expanded matches and landing page matches to measure conversion contribution and identify campaigns worth investigating.
AI Max adoption is growing, and Google is pushing advertisers to use it across Search campaigns.
A simple way to think about AI Max is that it gives Google more freedom to go beyond the advertiser’s existing keyword structure and find additional search queries. In some ways, it feels like a more aggressive version of broad match, but it also goes beyond keywords by using landing pages and other campaign signals.
That makes it important to understand how much of your campaign performance is being driven by AI Max. The challenge is that Google’s reporting doesn’t make that number easy to see.
How AI Max expands beyond your keywords
Google separates AI Max matching into two main categories.
AI Max expanded matches are additional searches Google finds by expanding beyond your existing keywords.
AI Max landing page matches are searches Google finds based on your landing pages and assets, even when those searches are outside your normal keyword targeting.
Together, these two categories show how much traffic AI Max is generating outside of your standard keyword matches.
This combined contribution is the number I care about most because it shows how much of the campaign is being driven by Google’s AI Max expansion rather than the keyword structure I originally built.
The Search Terms report doesn’t show the full picture
The obvious place to start is the Search Terms report.
Google now gives us better visibility into AI Max search queries, and this report is useful when we want to understand what types of searches AI Max is finding.
The issue is that Search Terms still doesn’t show the complete picture. A portion of search activity is grouped under Other search terms, and I’ve seen it represent 40% or even 50% of total search activity in some accounts. That makes it difficult to calculate AI Max’s total contribution using only visible search queries.
The Search Terms report can’t tell you exactly what percentage of total conversions came from AI Max. It’s still the right report for query analysis. It’s just not the right report for calculating AI Max % of total.
The Keywords report has the data you need
There’s another place in Google Ads that gives you a much better picture. If you select a campaign, go to the Keywords tab, and scroll to the bottom of the table, Google shows several summary rows.
The important ones are:
Total: Your keywords.
Total: AI Max expanded matches.
Total: AI Max landing page matches.
These rows roll up into Total: Campaign.
This gives you exactly what you need. You can take AI Max expanded matches and AI Max landing page matches, combine them, and compare that number with total campaign conversions.
The formula is:
Total AI Max conversions = AI Max expanded matches + AI Max landing page matches
Then:
AI Max % of total = Total AI Max conversions / Total campaign conversions
For example, if a campaign generated 100 conversions and 24 of them came from AI Max expanded matches and AI Max landing page matches combined, then AI Max represents 24% of total conversions.
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