Performance Max in 2026: More Control, Same Black Box?

Performance Max has been one of the most divisive campaign types in paid search since its launch. Advertisers have consistently praised its ability to drive conversions at scale while criticising the lack of transparency and control. In 2026, Google has addressed many of those complaints with new features, but the fundamental tension between automation and oversight remains.

Here is what has changed, what has not, and how to make Performance Max work harder with the tools now available.

What is new

The most significant updates to Performance Max in 2026 fall into three categories: negative keywords, brand controls, and reporting.

Negative keywords

Performance Max now supports negative keywords at both the campaign and account level. This was one of the most requested features since the campaign type launched, and its absence was a genuine barrier to adoption for many advertisers.

Negative match types behave the same way they do in traditional Search campaigns. You can use broad, phrase, and exact match negatives. Negative keyword lists can be applied at the campaign or account level, with a limit of 5,000 negatives per list. Support for Google Ads Editor and API-based management is also now available, making bulk management practical.

However, there is an important limitation: negative keywords in Performance Max only apply to Search and Shopping inventory. They do not affect Display, Video, or Discovery placements. This means you can prevent your ads from showing for specific search queries, but you cannot use negatives to control which audiences see your Display or YouTube ads.

Brand exclusions and customer controls

For retail advertisers with product feeds, brand exclusions now work differently across ad formats. You can apply brand exclusions to just Search text ads while keeping branded traffic for Shopping ads. This is useful if you want to manage branded Search traffic in a separate campaign but still show Shopping ads for brand-related queries.

You can also exclude specific customer lists from Performance Max campaigns. This enables strategies like focusing budget on new customer acquisition by excluding existing customers, or preventing recently converted users from seeing ads again too soon.

Reporting improvements

Google has introduced more granular reporting for Performance Max, including better asset-level performance data and more visibility into which channels and placements are driving results. This does not fully resolve the transparency concern, but it is a meaningful step forward.

You can now see performance broken down by asset group, and there is improved visibility into search term data. The search terms report for Performance Max is still not as comprehensive as for standard Search campaigns, but it shows more data than it did previously.

What has not changed

Despite these improvements, the fundamental architecture of Performance Max remains the same. It is a single campaign type that distributes your ads across Search, Shopping, Display, Video, Discovery, Gmail, and Maps. You set a budget and a bidding target, provide assets and audience signals, and Google's AI determines where and how to spend.

You still cannot control budget allocation across channels within a single Performance Max campaign. If you want to ensure a specific proportion of spend goes to Search versus Display, you need to manage that through separate campaigns.

You also still cannot see exactly why the AI made specific decisions. Why did it show a particular creative to a particular audience on a particular channel? The answer is opaque. You can see the outcome, but not the reasoning.

Making Performance Max work harder

With the new controls in place, here is a practical approach to getting better results from Performance Max.

Start with negatives

Before activating any other optimisation, build a comprehensive negative keyword list. Start with your existing negative keyword lists from Search campaigns and apply them to Performance Max. Then review the Performance Max search terms report weekly for the first month and add negatives aggressively for irrelevant queries.

Pay particular attention to branded terms if you are running separate brand campaigns. Performance Max will happily cannibalise your brand traffic unless you explicitly exclude brand terms.

Use audience signals strategically

Audience signals in Performance Max are suggestions, not targeting constraints. Google will use them as starting points but will expand beyond them if it finds conversions elsewhere. Despite this, strong audience signals improve the speed at which the AI finds your best prospects.

Layer in your first-party data: customer lists, website visitors, and CRM data. Add in-market and affinity audiences that align with your ideal customer profile. The more specific and high-quality your signals, the better the AI performs in the early learning phase.

Separate asset groups by theme

Asset groups are your primary lever for controlling creative and landing page relevance. Create distinct asset groups for different product categories, service lines, or audience segments. Each asset group should have its own set of headlines, descriptions, images, videos, and landing page URLs.

This structure helps the AI match the right creative to the right audience. A single asset group with generic messaging for your entire product range will underperform compared to multiple asset groups tailored to specific themes.

Monitor and iterate

Performance Max requires ongoing attention. Review asset performance regularly and replace underperforming assets. Check search terms weekly and update negatives. Monitor the auction insights report for competitive shifts. And compare Performance Max performance against your other campaign types to understand where it adds incremental value versus where it is simply cannibalising existing traffic.

When to use Performance Max and when not to

Performance Max works well for ecommerce brands with product feeds and strong conversion data, businesses looking to expand reach across multiple Google channels from a single campaign, and accounts with sufficient conversion volume (aim for at least 30 conversions per month) for the AI to optimise effectively.

It is less suited to accounts with very limited budgets where you need precise control over every dollar, businesses in highly regulated industries where ad copy must be pre-approved, lead generation campaigns where lead quality varies significantly (Performance Max optimises for volume, not quality, unless you feed it offline conversion data), and situations where you need to understand exactly which channel is driving results.

The bigger picture

The evolution of Performance Max reflects a broader trend in paid media: platforms are pushing toward AI-driven automation while gradually addressing the transparency and control concerns that advertisers raise. The 2026 updates are meaningful improvements, but they do not fundamentally change the trade-off. You are still handing significant control to Google's AI in exchange for the potential to find conversions you would not have found manually.

The advertisers who get the most from Performance Max are those who treat it as a tool that requires configuration, monitoring, and strategic guardrails, not as a replacement for thoughtful campaign management.