Google Just Delayed the DSA-to-AI-Max Migration to February 2027

If you paused your Dynamic Search Ads migration plan because you assumed the September 2026 deadline was firm, you now have breathing room you did not have two weeks ago. Google pushed the automatic migration of Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to AI Max for Search back by five months, from September 2026 to February 2027, and quietly restored the ability to create brand-new DSA campaigns after removing it earlier this year. (Search Engine Land)

This is not the same story as the AI Max rollout itself, which has been covered extensively including on this blog, most recently in our piece on Google's real-time policy reviews. This is Google admitting, in writing, that the original timeline moved faster than advertisers could actually handle it, and giving everyone five more months before DSA gets forcibly converted. If you manage Search campaigns, whether for one account or fifty client accounts at an agency, the new dates below change what you should be doing between now and the end of the year. You can find the rest of our ongoing Google Ads coverage on the Miraflow AI blog.

What Actually Changed

Three separate things happened, and it is easy to conflate them if you only skim a headline.

First, the automatic migration of legacy Dynamic Search Ads campaigns to AI Max for Search, which was originally scheduled to run through September 2026, is now scheduled for February 2027 instead. That is the headline change and the one worth building your Q4 plan around.

Second, Google restored the ability to create new DSA campaigns starting June 15, 2026, reversing an earlier phase-out step that had blocked new DSA creation entirely. (Search Engine Land) If you tried to spin up a new DSA campaign earlier this year and got blocked, that restriction is gone for the next several months.

Third, and this is the part that trips people up, not everything got delayed. Campaign-level Broad Match settings and legacy Automatically Created Assets (ACA) are still migrating to AI Max on the original September 2026 timeline. (Search Engine Land) Only the Dynamic Search Ads portion of the migration got pushed back. If your account uses both DSA and Broad Match with Smart Bidding, you are dealing with two different clocks now, not one.

A Quick History of How We Got Here

This delay only makes sense in context, so it is worth a short recap of how fast this migration has actually moved. Google first announced it would retire Dynamic Search Ads in favor of AI Max on April 15, 2026, with the original plan calling for eligible DSA, ACA, and campaign-level Broad Match campaigns to automatically migrate starting that September, and for new DSA campaign creation to stop entirely on the same date. (Search Engine Land) The stated reasoning at the time leaned on a broader argument about how people search: Google said "consumer search behavior is becoming more complex and less predictable," and framed AI Max as a way to go beyond what a landing page or a keyword list can capture by using "broader real-time intent data" instead. (Search Engine Land) Google also published a specific performance claim to back the push: an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS when advertisers used AI Max's full feature set instead of relying on search term matching alone. (Search Engine Land)

That is a five-month gap between announcement and forced migration for a change touching a huge share of active Search accounts, which in hindsight was always an aggressive timeline for something this structurally disruptive. New DSA creation was blocked as planned, then restored in June, then blocked again for Broad Match and ACA specifically in August, then the DSA portion of the whole plan got pushed five months. Reading the announcements in sequence, this looks less like one clean rollout and more like Google iterating in public as real account data came in from the advertisers who migrated early. If you migrated a DSA campaign back in September when the original deadline was still active and it did not go well, that is useful context: you were part of the group whose feedback likely contributed to this delay in the first place.

Why Google Delayed It

Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, gave a direct and unusually candid explanation for the change: "We've heard your feedback loud and clear: you need more time to transition." (Search Engine Land) The stated reasoning ties directly to Q4. Pushing a forced migration of a core Search campaign type into the exact weeks when most advertisers are locking in budgets, creative, and bidding strategy for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday shopping season is close to the worst possible timing for a mandatory platform change, and enough advertisers apparently said so loudly enough that Google moved the date.

It is worth reading between the lines here a little. Google has pushed several AI Max related deadlines in 2026, and each time the public reasoning has been some version of "advertisers need more time." That is probably true, but it also reflects a pattern: DSA campaigns, unlike standard Search campaigns using Broad Match, carry a lot of advertiser-specific logic, page feed rules, URL exclusions, category-based targeting, that does not translate cleanly into an AI Max equivalent. A migration that works fine for a simple keyword-and-bid Search campaign can genuinely break a complex DSA setup that has been tuned over years, and Google's own testing and support volume during the earlier stages of this rollout likely surfaced exactly that gap. Treat the delay less as a courtesy and more as a signal that DSA-to-AI-Max parity was not fully solved yet.

The Full New Timeline

Here is every date that matters, pulled together in one place so you are not cross-referencing three different Google Ads Help pages to figure out what applies to your account.

A detail buried in that timeline that is easy to miss: the developer side of this has its own clock too. Older Google Ads API versions that still support the legacy Broad Match and ACA campaign structures are scheduled to sunset around September 2027. (Search Engine Land) If your team runs any custom scripts, bid management tools, or reporting pipelines against the Google Ads API, this is worth flagging to whoever owns that integration now rather than in month eleven of a twelve-month deprecation window. It is also worth reviewing how your account handled the parallel Local Inventory Ads default change from earlier this year, since accounts that had to scramble on that update tend to be the same accounts that benefit most from planning ahead on this one.

What the 7% Conversion Number Actually Means

Google's own justification for pushing advertisers toward AI Max in the first place was a specific claim: an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS when advertisers use AI Max's full feature set instead of relying on search term matching alone. That number is worth sitting with for a second instead of repeating it at face value, because two words in that sentence carry almost all of the weight: "average" and "full feature set."

An average across a huge, diverse set of accounts tells you almost nothing about what happens to any single account, including yours. Averages like this get pulled up by accounts that were leaving obvious performance on the table under the old system, poorly structured DSA campaigns, thin page feeds, minimal negative keyword hygiene, and pulled down by accounts that were already running a tight, well-optimized setup. If your DSA campaign has been carefully tuned for two years with a clean page feed and a mature negative keyword list, you are much closer to the second group, and a generic 7% improvement claim tells you very little about what you should actually expect. "Full feature set" is the other qualifier worth noting: that number assumes an advertiser adopts everything AI Max offers, not a partial migration. An account that migrates the campaign type but skips the broader targeting signals or the AI-generated asset variety is not the account that 7% figure describes.

None of this means the number is wrong or that AI Max underperforms DSA. It means the number is a starting expectation, not a guarantee, and the entire point of the extended testing window Google just created is to find out where your specific account actually lands instead of assuming the average applies to you. For a deeper look at how Google frames AI Max's targeting logic itself, our coverage of Google's Ask Advisor AI agent breaks down the same underlying signals AI Max leans on for Search.

What This Means If You Manage One Account

If you run Search ads for a single business, the practical takeaway is simple: you are not required to touch your DSA campaigns before February 2027, and you can spend the next several months running real experiments instead of reacting to a forced deadline. Set up a genuine side-by-side test, the same DSA campaign structure running in parallel with an AI Max for Search campaign covering the same page feed and targeting logic, and give it enough budget and time to reach statistical significance before making a call. A good rule of thumb from experienced Search advertisers is to run the comparison for at least four to six weeks and through at least one full billing cycle before drawing a conclusion, since Search performance can swing meaningfully week to week for reasons that have nothing to do with which campaign type is running. Google's own guidance during this extended window explicitly recommends this kind of voluntary, controlled experiment over either rushing to migrate or ignoring the change entirely. (Search Engine Land)

One thing worth doing regardless of which way your test comes out: export and archive your current DSA performance history now, while the campaigns are still running in their original structure. Historical performance data tends to get harder to cleanly attribute once a campaign type has migrated, and having a clean "before" baseline saved outside the platform makes the eventual comparison, whenever your account actually migrates, much easier to defend to a client or a boss. Pull at least twelve months of monthly data broken out by conversion volume, cost per conversion, and top-performing landing pages, since a single quarter of data will not capture seasonal patterns that matter for a lot of DSA-heavy accounts, particularly retail and travel businesses whose Search performance shifts dramatically between Q4 and the rest of the year.

Small accounts with limited weekly budget face a specific practical problem here that larger accounts do not: a side-by-side test needs enough spend on both sides to produce a meaningful sample size, and an account spending a few hundred dollars a week on DSA may need the full extended window just to accumulate enough data for either campaign to reach significance. If that describes your account, do not force a decision by February just because the calendar says so. A slower, more deliberate test that runs into the migration date and gets finished with whatever data the automatic transition leaves you is still more useful than a rushed two-week test that produces a coin-flip result you cannot actually trust.

What This Means If You Manage Multiple Accounts

Agencies and freelancers managing several DSA-heavy accounts have a genuinely harder coordination problem than a single in-house advertiser does, and the delay is more valuable for this group specifically. Instead of one deadline to hit, you now have a five-month window to stagger migrations client by client, starting with the accounts where DSA performance has already been mediocre (lower risk if AI Max underperforms slightly during the transition) and saving your highest-performing, most complex DSA setups for last, once you have real data from the earlier migrations to inform how you handle them.

The smartest move for an agency right now is building a single internal audit template you run against every client account: how many DSA campaigns exist, how much of total Search spend runs through them, whether page feeds have any custom rules that might not translate cleanly, and what the current cost-per-conversion baseline looks like. Run that audit once across your whole book of business in the next few weeks, rank accounts by migration complexity, and you turn a scramble in January into a planned, staggered rollout you control instead of one Google controls for you in February.

Client communication is the part of this that agencies most often underprepare for, and it is worth handling proactively rather than reactively. A client who reads a single alarming headline about Google "forcing" a migration and does not see the follow-up delay coverage may message you asking why nothing has changed yet, or worse, ask you to rush a migration that was never actually due. A short, factual update, sent to every affected client at once, stating the new February 2027 date, confirming their account is on the extended timeline, and outlining your staggered testing plan, heads off that confusion and doubles as a visible demonstration that you are actively managing the account rather than waiting for Google to act on your behalf. Agencies weighing how much of that creative refresh to hand off to AI tooling versus a human designer may also find our guide to AI prompts for LinkedIn post images useful, since the same fast-iteration logic applies whether the destination is a Search ad or a social post announcing the change to clients. Agencies that treat a platform policy change as a client communication opportunity, not just a technical to-do, consistently retain accounts better than ones that only react when a client asks first.

There is also a resourcing question worth planning around now rather than in January. Running a genuine side-by-side test on every DSA-heavy account in a book of business is real work, building the parallel campaign, monitoring it, pulling comparative reports, and writing up a recommendation, and doing it for twenty or thirty accounts in the same few weeks right before the February deadline is a recipe for rushed, low-quality analysis. Spreading that work across the full extended window, a handful of accounts tested and migrated each month starting now instead of all of them tested in January, produces better decisions and a much less stressful few months for whoever on your team owns Search campaign management.

Common Mistakes Advertisers Are Making With This News

A few reactions we are already seeing to this announcement are worth avoiding.

• Assuming the delay applies to Broad Match and ACA campaigns too. It does not. Those are still migrating on the original September 2026 schedule, and treating your whole account as "delayed" can mean missing a change that already happened.
• Doing nothing for the next four months because the deadline feels far away. February 2027 is genuinely close once you account for the time it takes to run a proper side-by-side test, review results, and build a migration plan for anything beyond a handful of campaigns.
• Rushing to migrate everything immediately just because AI Max is now the default for new Search campaigns. Google's own data shows faster first conversions during initial AI Max launch periods in some cases, but "faster first conversion" and "better long-run cost efficiency for your specific account" are not the same claim, and only your own test data can tell you which one you are actually getting.
• Forgetting that new DSA campaign creation, restored on June 15, 2026, is also on borrowed time. Building a brand-new DSA campaign in late 2026 without a plan for its February 2027 migration is setting yourself up for the exact disruption this delay was meant to prevent.
• Treating every Google Ads deadline the same way regardless of source. Not every change is a full migration like this one; some, like the account-level customer list auto-classification change, require a quick settings check rather than a multi-month test plan. Knowing which category a given announcement falls into saves you from over-reacting to a minor update or under-reacting to a major one.
• Treating this as purely a targeting and bidding decision and ignoring creative. A migration to AI Max changes how your ad copy and assets get selected and combined, which makes this a reasonable moment to also refresh the actual creative running in these campaigns, not just the settings underneath them.

Using the Extra Time Well

The most productive way to spend the next several months is treating this less like a compliance deadline and more like a genuine testing window Google handed you. Run the audit, run the side-by-side experiment, and use whatever time is left over to also modernize the ad assets themselves, since AI Max leans more heavily on Google's ability to select and combine strong creative than legacy DSA campaigns did.

This is also a reasonable moment to refresh the actual visuals and copy variations feeding into your Search and Shopping creative, rather than only adjusting settings. The AI Image Generator on Miraflow can produce on-brand ad visuals and quick variations without booking a photoshoot, which matters more once your account is leaning on an AI-driven format that rewards having several strong creative options to choose from instead of one static banner reused for months. Miraflow's AI image generation tools also work well for Shopping-style product imagery if your DSA-to-AI-Max transition touches Shopping placements alongside Search. If you want a ready-made starting point instead of building prompts from scratch, our guide to AI prompts for Google Ads display banners has 15 templates built specifically for this kind of refresh. You can also read our breakdown of the Google Ads AI Max auto-upgrade for Search campaigns for the Broad Match side of this same migration, since that piece covers the part of the timeline that is not delayed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to migrate my DSA campaigns before February 2027? No. The migration is automatic starting in February 2027, but you can voluntarily migrate earlier, or run side-by-side tests in the meantime, or simply wait for the automatic transition. Nothing is required from your side before then unless you want to move faster.

Does this delay also apply to Broad Match campaigns? No. Campaign-level Broad Match settings and legacy Automatically Created Assets are still migrating to AI Max on the original September 2026 schedule. Only the Dynamic Search Ads migration was pushed back.

Can I still create new DSA campaigns right now? Yes. Creating new DSA campaigns was restored on June 15, 2026, after being blocked earlier in the year. Keep in mind these campaigns will still be subject to the February 2027 automatic migration like any other existing DSA campaign.

What happens to my historical DSA performance data after migration? Google has not published specifics on data continuity for DSA specifically. Given how attribution has behaved in prior AI Max migrations, it is a reasonable precaution to export and archive your current DSA performance history now, before your account migrates.

Should I migrate early to get ahead of the crowd, or wait? There is no clear universal answer. Google's data suggests some accounts see faster initial conversions after moving to AI Max, but the only way to know how your specific account performs is to run a real side-by-side test during the extended window rather than assuming either early migration or waiting is automatically better.

Is this the last delay we should expect from Google on AI Max? There is no way to know for certain, but Google has pushed multiple AI Max related deadlines throughout 2026 already, and the DSA migration specifically involves more advertiser-specific configuration than a standard Search campaign. Do not build a plan that assumes February 2027 is guaranteed to hold, but do not assume it will move again either. Plan for the current date and stay ready to adjust.

Does the delay affect Performance Max campaigns using the Search Network? No. This specific delay is scoped to standalone Dynamic Search Ads campaigns migrating to AI Max for Search. Performance Max campaigns follow their own separate settings and update schedule, and should not be assumed to be covered by this particular timeline change.

What happens if I do nothing at all until February 2027? Your DSA campaigns will automatically migrate to AI Max starting February 1, 2027, using Google's default migration settings rather than any custom configuration you might have chosen. This is not a catastrophic outcome, but it does mean you lose the chance to control how the transition happens and to compare performance beforehand, which is the main value this delay is actually offering you.

Where to Go From Here

If this is the first Google Ads timeline change you have tracked closely this year, it is worth catching up on the broader AI Max story before February 2027 arrives, starting with our coverage of the Google Ads AI Max auto-upgrade for Search campaigns and the Limited Ad Serving policy expansion that landed earlier in the year. Both changes interact with the same account settings this delay touches.

Conclusion

Google handed advertisers five extra months on one of the more disruptive parts of the AI Max migration, and the smartest response is not relief followed by inaction. Use the window to actually test DSA against AI Max on your own data, audit every account that still runs DSA if you manage more than one, and treat the creative running inside these campaigns as part of the migration plan, not an afterthought. February 2027 will arrive faster than it feels like it will right now, and the advertisers who used this delay to prepare will be in a completely different position than the ones who just noticed the deadline moved and went back to ignoring it.