Microsoft Advertising Rolls Out AI Max to All Accounts Globally
Microsoft Advertising has started rolling out AI Max to all advertiser accounts globally. The feature, announced on August 20, 2026, by Navah Hopkins (Microsoft Ads Liaison), combines three AI-driven capabilities into a single opt-in setting for Search campaigns.
What AI Max Does
AI Max bundles three features that use Microsoft AI to extend campaign reach and automate creative work:
Search term matching expands ad delivery beyond an advertiser's existing keyword list. The system uses keywords, ads, landing pages, and contextual signals to find relevant queries that may not be reached today. Microsoft says it is designed to help ads appear on more complex conversational queries, particularly in AI experiences on Bing and Copilot.
Text customization generates additional messaging variations from an advertiser's existing assets and website content. Microsoft AI tests these variations and selects combinations at auction time. The generated assets are labeled and editable.
Final URL expansion routes users to the page on an advertiser's site that best matches their search intent, rather than sending all traffic to a single static landing page.
Brand Controls and Reporting
Navah Hopkins wrote on LinkedIn that brand controls, reporting, and choice are present from day one. These include term exclusions for text asset generation. Advertisers can set URL rules and ad group-level settings to govern how AI Max operates within their campaigns.
AI Max remains an opt-in setting. Advertisers must toggle it on for individual Search campaigns. Microsoft encourages testing all three features together using optimization experiments, though each can be enabled or disabled independently.
What Carries Over From Previous Features
Advertisers already using autogenerated text assets for Search campaigns or Predictive matching will find those capabilities moved under the AI Max settings. According to Hopkins, those AI Max settings are turned on automatically in those existing Search campaigns. No other AI Max features activate without explicit opt-in.
When importing campaigns from Google Ads or other platforms, AI Max settings carry over into the corresponding Microsoft Advertising campaign. Campaigns that originated from an upgraded Dynamic Search Ad (DSA) campaign convert back to DSA format on Microsoft Advertising while additional functionality is being built.
Relevance to AI Search
The search term matching component explicitly targets conversational queries in AI experiences on Bing and Copilot. As AI-powered search interfaces handle more queries that do not match traditional keyword patterns, AI Max is Microsoft's mechanism for ensuring advertisers can reach users in those environments without manually predicting every possible query formulation.
The text customization and URL expansion features address the creative and landing-page challenges that arise when ads serve against a wider, less predictable set of queries generated by AI search systems.
What Has Not Been Confirmed
Microsoft has not published performance data comparing AI Max-enabled campaigns against standard campaigns. The announcement does not specify whether AI Max affects ad ranking, cost-per-click, or quality score calculations. There is no public timeline for when all accounts will see the toggle — the rollout is described as having started, but availability may vary by account.
The extent to which AI Max-generated queries differ from those matched by traditional broad match modifiers or phrase match is also not documented in the announcement.
