Performance Max Optimization in 2026: The New Steering, Reporting, and Negative Keyword Controls Explained

Performance Max has always had a reputation problem among advertisers: it works, often very well, but it has historically felt like a black box where budget goes in and results come out with almost no visibility into why. That changed meaningfully in 2026. Google rolled out the biggest set of steering and reporting controls Performance Max has seen since it launched, giving advertisers real levers to pull instead of just trusting the algorithm and hoping.

This post covers exactly what changed, how to actually use the new controls, and why creative assets, not settings, remain the single biggest lever for Performance Max performance in 2026. If you are building out asset groups as part of this, the AI Image Generator in Miraflow AI and the cinematic AI video generator are both useful for producing the multiple aspect ratios Performance Max asset groups require without a full photo or video shoot for every campaign.

What Actually Changed in Performance Max for 2026

Google's own steering and reporting update, announced through its Think with Google business resources, frames this round of updates as moving advertisers "beyond just driving performance" toward actually understanding the reasoning behind campaign results. Three categories of change matter most.

Negative Keywords Finally Work the Way Advertisers Expected

Negative keywords were the single most requested Performance Max control for years, and Google has been rolling this in gradually rather than all at once. Campaign-level negative keywords for Performance Max launched in January 2025, the per-campaign limit jumped from 100 to 10,000 terms in March 2025, and shared negative keyword lists became available for Performance Max in August 2025, according to Google's own support documentation on the feature. On top of campaign-level lists, a single account-level negative keyword list of up to 1,000 terms applies automatically across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns, which is the right place to park universal exclusions like unrelated job-seeker or careers-related queries rather than repeating them in every campaign.

One limitation is easy to miss: Performance Max negative keywords only suppress Search and Shopping inventory. They do not affect Display, YouTube, Gmail, or Discover placements, since those channels are not keyword-matched the same way search inventory is. If wasted spend is showing up specifically on Display or YouTube placements inside Performance Max, negative keywords will not fix it, you need the placement and network reporting covered below instead.

Audience and Customer List Exclusions

Advertisers can now exclude specific customer lists from Performance Max campaigns entirely, not just target them. Google's own framing is direct: this helps a campaign's budget focus on acquiring new customers rather than re-engaging people who have already converted, which is exactly the kind of control that was previously only available in Search and Display campaigns, not Performance Max. Google has also extended "your data exclusions" in campaign settings to cover customer match and remarketing audiences specifically, closing a gap that existed since Performance Max's original launch.

Enhanced brand controls round this out, letting advertisers exclude competitor terms and set brand safety parameters that apply consistently across every channel Performance Max touches, rather than having to configure brand safety separately per channel the way earlier versions required.

Reporting That Actually Shows Where Budget Went

This is the update advertisers have wanted most, since Performance Max's biggest complaint has always been "I don't know where my money went." The 2026 reporting overhaul adds three specific views:

• Channel-level budget reporting, showing exactly how spend is distributed across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps, plus a projection tool for end-of-month spend based on current daily budget.
• Full audience reporting, adding demographic breakdowns by age range and gender that were previously unavailable inside Performance Max campaigns.
• Network-segmented placement reporting, accessible through the "When and where ads showed" tab, letting advertisers see specifically which network and placement combinations are serving ads, which is the direct tool for catching wasted spend on a channel negative keywords cannot touch.

A newer beta feature, Promotion Mode, is also worth knowing about if you run sales or launches. It lets advertisers temporarily raise both their ROAS tolerance and daily budget together during a defined window, like a seasonal sale, without permanently changing baseline campaign settings the way a manual bid or budget change would.

How to Actually Use These Controls

Knowing the features exist is different from using them well. A few practical starting points:

1. Audit your account-level negative list first. Since it applies everywhere automatically, get the obvious universal exclusions (careers, free, DIY, unrelated brand names) in that single list before touching campaign-level lists.
2. Add campaign-level negatives based on the new placement report, not guesswork. Pull the network-segmented placement report, find where spend is landing on irrelevant Display or YouTube inventory, and use that data to inform Display and YouTube exclusion settings, since keyword negatives will not touch those channels.
3. Exclude converted customers before you exclude anyone else. The customer list exclusion feature is most valuable for advertisers whose goal is new customer acquisition specifically, so start there rather than guessing at broader audience exclusions.
4. Check the budget projection tool weekly, not monthly. Catching an overspend trajectory two weeks into the month is far more useful than seeing it after the month has already closed.
5. Reserve Promotion Mode for genuinely time-boxed events. Since it changes ROAS tolerance and budget simultaneously, using it outside a real, defined promotional window can quietly erode your baseline efficiency without a clear signal pointing back to why.

Why Creative Assets Are Still the Biggest Lever

All of the steering and reporting controls above are genuinely useful, but they are optimization at the margins. The single biggest driver of Performance Max performance has always been the quality and variety of the assets feeding each asset group, and Google's own messaging around its parallel Asset Studio update makes this explicit, describing the goal as helping advertisers "turn brand guidelines into high-performing creative, faster."

Performance Max asset groups need multiple image aspect ratios (square, portrait, and landscape) plus video in matching formats to serve properly across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover. Most advertisers, especially smaller teams, simply do not have a full photo and video shoot's worth of assets in every required ratio, which quietly limits how well Performance Max can actually perform regardless of how well the targeting controls above are configured.

This is where generating asset variations directly solves a real production bottleneck rather than a targeting one. A few prompt starting points for filling out an asset group:

Image Assets

Square product shot (1:1)

Lifestyle product photo of a skincare bottle held in one hand against a softly blurred bathroom counter background, natural window light, clean minimal composition, square 1:1 crop suited for a Performance Max asset group, no visible face, no text overlay, high resolution commercial photography

Portrait lifestyle shot (4:5)

Vertical portrait-orientation product photo of a pair of running shoes placed on a textured outdoor trail, morning light, shallow depth of field, 4:5 crop suited for a Performance Max asset group, no people, no text overlay, high resolution commercial photography

Landscape hero shot (1.91:1)

Wide landscape-orientation lifestyle photo of a dining table set for a small gathering with a featured product placed naturally among the place settings, warm evening light, 1.91:1 crop suited for a Performance Max asset group hero image, no readable text, high resolution commercial photography

Video Assets

Square product demo (1:1)

Short square-format product demo video, a hand rotating a product slowly under soft studio light to show all sides, clean neutral background, smooth steady motion, 1:1 aspect ratio suited for a Performance Max video asset, no text overlay, no people speaking

Vertical lifestyle video (9:16)

Short vertical-format lifestyle video of a product being used naturally in a everyday setting, handheld but stable camera movement, warm natural lighting, 9:16 aspect ratio suited for a Performance Max video asset, no text overlay

Headline Variations

Five short benefit-focused headlines

Generate five short Performance Max headline variations, each under 30 characters, for a mid-range wireless headphone product, focused on comfort, battery life, sound quality, price value, and gifting, no punctuation gimmicks, plain benefit-focused language

Generating these directly inside the AI Image Generator in Miraflow AI and the cinematic AI video generator means an asset group can actually be filled out with real aspect-ratio variety instead of one photo stretched and cropped into shapes it was never composed for, which is one of the most common, avoidable reasons a Performance Max asset group underperforms.

If you want a broader set of ad-creative-specific prompts beyond Performance Max asset groups, our AI prompts for Google Ads display banners and AI prompts for Facebook ad creatives cover more format-specific starting points, and our guide to AI prompts for Amazon FBA product images is useful if your Performance Max campaigns also feed a Shopping feed.

Here is a real walkthrough of Performance Max optimization strategy for 2026, useful alongside the specific controls covered above:

Common Mistakes With the New Controls

• Assuming negative keywords now cover every channel. They only affect Search and Shopping inventory inside Performance Max, not Display, YouTube, Gmail, or Discover.
• Adding the same negative keywords at both the account level and every campaign level, which wastes the 1,000-term account list's capacity on redundant entries already handled at the campaign level.
• Excluding audiences without a clear acquisition goal behind the decision. Blanket exclusions without a strategy can shrink Performance Max's available signal and hurt performance rather than improve it.
• Treating the new reporting as a monthly check-in instead of using the budget projection tool proactively during the month, when there is still time to act on it.
• Leaving asset groups with only one aspect ratio per asset type, which limits how much of Performance Max's cross-channel inventory a campaign can actually serve into well.

Where This Fits Inside Miraflow AI

Performance Max's 2026 controls give advertisers real visibility and steering, but none of it compensates for thin, low-variety creative. The AI Image Generator in Miraflow AI supports text-to-image generation, image-to-image editing, and inpainting for producing the square, portrait, and landscape image variants a full asset group needs, while the cinematic AI video generator covers the matching video formats. If your campaigns also drive traffic to organic short-form content, Text2Shorts and the YouTube Thumbnail Maker round out the same production workflow for the organic side of a campaign. If you are also evaluating how Google's new agentic tools fit into this picture, our explainer on Google's Ask Advisor covers the AI agent Google introduced alongside these Performance Max updates. Browse more marketing-focused guides on the Miraflow AI blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do Performance Max negative keywords apply to YouTube and Display placements? No. They only suppress Search and Shopping inventory. Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover placements need to be managed through the network-segmented placement reporting and brand safety controls instead.

How many negative keywords can I add to a Performance Max campaign? Up to 10,000 terms per campaign as of the March 2025 limit increase, plus a separate account-level list of up to 1,000 terms that applies automatically across eligible campaign types including Performance Max.

What is the difference between customer list exclusions and data exclusions? Customer list exclusions remove specific uploaded customer lists from targeting entirely. Data exclusions, extended in 2026 to cover customer match and remarketing audiences, control which conversion or audience data Performance Max's algorithms learn from, a related but distinct setting.

Is Promotion Mode available to everyone? As of this writing it is a beta feature for Search and Performance Max campaigns, so availability may vary by account while Google continues rolling it out more broadly.

Why does Google keep saying creative is the biggest lever, not settings? Because Performance Max is an algorithmic system serving across seven different channels with very different creative requirements. Weak or narrow creative limits how well the algorithm can perform even with perfect targeting settings, which is exactly why Google paired this steering update with a parallel Asset Studio creative update at the same event.

Do I need different aspect ratios for every single asset group, or can I reuse the same images everywhere? Different asset groups can share creative, but each individual asset group still needs multiple aspect ratios internally (square, portrait, landscape for images, matching ratios for video) to serve properly across all of Performance Max's channels.

Conclusion

The 2026 Performance Max updates are the closest Google has come to answering advertisers' longest-standing complaint about the campaign type: not enough control, not enough visibility. Negative keywords, audience exclusions, and genuinely useful channel-level reporting all give advertisers real levers instead of a black box. But none of it replaces the fundamental requirement that has always driven Performance Max results most: enough creative variety, in the right aspect ratios, to actually let the algorithm serve well across every channel it touches. Use the new controls to steer and monitor, and treat filling out your asset groups properly as the highest-leverage work still left to do by hand, or with an AI image and video generator built for exactly that production gap.