For the past year Google’s message to advertisers has been consistent: if you want your ads inside AI Mode, move to AI Max for Search or Performance Max. On 4 September the company quietly confirmed an exception. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, said that “exact and phrase match keywords are eligible to serve text ads in AI Mode”, describing it as “a small experiment that recently kicked off”.
The test was not announced. It was spotted by advertisers first. Anthony Higman, founder of the agency AdSquire, wrote on LinkedIn on 3 September that “Google is now serving regular pure search campaigns with restrictive match types in AI mode”, and repeated the observation on X the next day, adding that “before this the ONLY way to show in those places was through ai max, p-max or broad and smart bidding”. Search Engine Roundtable published Marvin’s confirmation on 4 September, with PPC Land and Search Engine Land following.
Context: AI Mode was built as an AI Max surface
AI Mode is Google’s conversational search tab, and ads inside it have so far been reserved for Google’s automated campaign types. At Google Marketing Live on 20 May, Google introduced the new formats for AI Mode, Highlighted Answers and Conversational Discovery ads, and told advertisers that to “take full advantage of all these new AI-powered formats” they should “build a strong foundation with AI Max for Search, AI Max for Shopping campaigns and Performance Max”.
That message came with a deadline. As we covered on 1 September, Google Ads is automatically upgrading Search campaigns that use campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets to AI Max through September, while the Dynamic Search Ads migration has been pushed back to February 2027. The direction of travel was clear: keyword campaigns with tight match types were the past, AI Max was the future, and AI Mode inventory was the reward for making the switch.
The new experiment complicates that story. According to Marvin, a plain Search campaign built on exact and phrase match can now show a text ad inside an AI Mode answer, without any AI Max feature enabled.
What Google actually said
Marvin’s full statement, posted as a comment under Higman’s LinkedIn thread, is short enough to quote in full: “This is a small experiment that recently kicked off. Exact and phrase match keywords are eligible to serve text ads in AI Mode. Note however that this is limited to cases where there is explicit and direct user intent. AI Max and PMax for Search are designed to capture complex conversational intent and access our latest ad formats (like Highlighted Answers).”
Three limits follow from that sentence.
- Text ads only. The experiment covers standard text ads. Highlighted Answers and the other Gemini-built formats remain tied to AI Max and Performance Max.
- “Explicit and direct user intent” only. Google has not published a definition of the phrase. PPC Land notes that no documentation accompanies the test. Our reading is that it means AI Mode prompts that look like a classic search query, where the keyword match is unambiguous, rather than long conversational requests.
- A small experiment. Google has not said which accounts, markets or share of AI Mode traffic are included, and has not said whether the test will become a default. Search Engine Land reports that Higman confirmed the behaviour across multiple campaigns and tests, so it is not a single-account glitch, but the scope beyond that is unknown.
There is also a reporting gap. Google Ads still does not break AI Mode out as a separate placement, so advertisers in the test cannot see how much of their exact match spend went to AI Mode answers. Higman’s discovery came from watching search term reports and ad previews, not from a new column.
Why Google would run this test
Google has not explained its motivation, so what follows is our view. Two explanations seem plausible, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The first is inventory. AI Mode answers can only carry ads that Google’s systems judge relevant, and for a narrow, high-intent prompt the most relevant ad may belong to an advertiser who never left exact match. Excluding those campaigns leaves ad slots empty or filled with weaker matches.
The second is the migration itself. Many advertisers have resisted AI Max precisely because it loosens keyword control, and the September auto-upgrade has made that tension public. Letting exact and phrase match campaigns into AI Mode for direct-intent queries removes one argument for switching, but it also removes one reason to leave Google Ads for narrower channels. Marvin’s statement still frames AI Max as the route to “complex conversational intent” and the newest formats, so the incentive to upgrade is reduced, not removed.
What it means for your business
Check your search terms for AI Mode traffic. If your account runs exact or phrase match Search campaigns, there is a chance some impressions since early September came from AI Mode. Google does not label them, so the signal is indirect: search terms that are longer or more question-shaped than your keyword lists usually produce, appearing under exact and phrase match keywords. Compare the first week of September with August on click-through rate, conversion rate and cost per conversion for your tightest keywords. A change in those numbers with no change in your settings is worth noting, even if you cannot yet prove the cause.
Do not restructure around a test. The experiment is small, undocumented and reversible. Rebuilding campaigns to chase it would be a mistake. The sensible move is to keep your exact and phrase match structure clean, so that if Google widens the test you are already eligible, and to keep your negative keyword lists current, since AI Mode prompts may match phrase keywords in ways your search term history has not shown before.
Keep AI Max as a deliberate decision, not a default. This is the point we make most often in our paid advertising work: the question is not whether AI Max is good or bad, but which parts of an account benefit from broader matching and which are better kept tight. Google’s own statement now describes two lanes inside AI Mode, direct intent for keyword campaigns and conversational intent for AI Max and Performance Max. An account can run both, and for most businesses that split is more useful than choosing a side.
Watch for the placement report. The most valuable outcome of this test would be a line in Google Ads that shows AI Mode as its own placement, with its own metrics. Google has not promised one. Until it appears, every claim about how ads perform in AI Mode, including Google’s, rests on data advertisers cannot see. That is a good reason to keep landing page and conversion tracking clean, because the only numbers you fully control are the ones after the click.
Google has a history of turning “small experiments” into defaults without a second announcement, and of ending them just as quietly. For now the practical change is modest: an exact match campaign is no longer automatically locked out of Google’s AI answers. Whether that stays true is the thing to watch in the next few weeks.
