Google Ads quietly added a warning to its AI Max help documentation about keyword prioritization. According to the new paragraph, spotted by Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz, broad keywords stop inheriting exact match prioritization once an advertiser switches off broad match at campaign level, or shifts that campaign onto AI Max.
Fixing this requires manual work, not a setting toggle. Advertisers who want to preserve exact match priority must add separate copies of those exact match keywords inside the new AI Max campaign. Converting an existing broad keyword to exact match is possible, but Google’s own documentation notes that the conversion erases the keyword’s historical performance stats.
Advertisers who skip this step get AI Max’s default prioritization, which treats broad keywords as broad regardless of prior exact match intent. Google marked the addition with a red highlight box on the support page, a signal the company treats this as a meaningful clarification rather than routine copy editing.
Anyone migrating campaigns onto AI Max this quarter should audit exact match keyword lists before the switch. Historical stats lost in a broad-to-exact conversion cannot be recovered afterward.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz first reported the documentation change.
