Google will retire the Related Search format for AdSense Auto ads on August 6, 2026. The company notified affected publishers by email on Friday, July 24, according to a screenshot shared by publisher Bruno Ramos Lara and reported the same day by Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz. That puts the total notice window at roughly thirteen days, a short runway for any publisher who has not already planned a replacement for the traffic the format sent elsewhere on site.
The email describes two consequences, and publishers should treat them as separate problems. Starting August 6, the format “will no longer appear on your site,” so serving simply stops. Google also says the option “will also be removed as a format option from the AdSense frontend,” meaning the toggle itself disappears from the interface. Once that removal ships, there is no setting left to switch back on, even if a replacement Auto ads format underperforms the slot it took over.
Related Search never worked as a conventional ad unit. Google’s own description says it lets a site “show your users search terms that are related to the content of the page they’re viewing,” and clicking one of those terms carries the visitor to a search results page hosted on the publisher’s own domain, where AdSense for Search ads generate the actual revenue. The format was a navigational layer sitting in front of monetization, not inventory itself: one click, one page load, then a separate results page where the billable ad event happens.
That two-step mechanic is why the August 6 cutoff creates more than a revenue gap. Funnel requests, funnel impressions, funnel clicks and funnel RPM tied to Related Search all end on the same date, which breaks the time series for any account that ran the format, independent of what replacement Auto ad formats generate afterward. A publisher comparing this quarter’s AdSense for Search funnel against last quarter’s will hit a structural discontinuity in the data itself, not just a dip in a single line item.
Google’s message adds that publishers “don’t need to do anything” because “all remaining Auto ad formats will continue to function as normal” and “some of them may replace the original Related Search slots.” That framing skips over the size of the gap. A manually built version of the same concept, sold as related search for content, still exists inside AdSense for Search, but it is a contracted product rather than a toggle: it requires an AFS agreement, an assigned account manager, review of page mock-ups and a code deployment. Losing the Auto ads switch does not open a path to that alternative. It opens a sales cycle.
The retirement fits a pattern rather than standing alone. Google pulled parked-domain ads from the Search Partner Network in February 2026, deprecated custom search styles on April 1, 2026, and capped native style IDs at 100 per account starting June 3, 2026, after already retiring AFS session metrics in September 2025. Related Search itself was short-lived: it launched for Auto ads in October 2023 and expanded to French, Spanish and Japanese sites in September 2024 before this cancellation. The shutdown also lands against a soft backdrop for the business line it belongs to: Google’s Network revenue, which bundles AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager, fell 4 percent year over year to $6.97 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
Publishers running Related Search should pull funnel-attributed AFS numbers now, while the pre-August 6 baseline is still intact, and open an AFS contracting conversation early if the manual product is the intended fallback rather than assuming the Auto ads system will substitute for it automatically.
Barry Schwartz reported the retirement for Search Engine Roundtable on Friday, July 24, 2026.
