A Branded Searches control has appeared inside Google Ads AI Max campaigns, giving some advertisers a native way to choose whether the campaign type competes for brand-name queries, brand-excluded queries, or purely unbranded demand. Search Engine Land reported the finding on May 29, 2026, citing Paid Search specialist Thomas Eccel, who shared a screenshot on LinkedIn. Google has not issued a formal announcement and the setting appears to be in a limited rollout.
The three options visible in affected accounts are: show ads on all relevant searches (the current default), control branded searches using brand inclusions and exclusions, and show ads only on unbranded searches. That third option is the significant one. Previously, advertisers who wanted AI Max to stay off branded queries had to build and maintain brand exclusion lists at the account or campaign level. A native toggle removes that workaround and makes the intent explicit in the campaign structure.
Brand traffic bleed has been one of the loudest complaints against AI Max since the format launched. The concern is specific: AI Max’s keyword-expansion logic can serve on branded queries that a separate brand campaign already owns, inflating costs for clicks that were highly likely to convert anyway, complicating attribution across campaigns, and obscuring whether AI Max is generating incremental demand or simply cannibalizing it. None of those problems require a discovery that branded traffic is valuable. The problem is that AI Max was capturing it without advertisers having a clean way to prevent it.
The “unbranded only” option reframes how AI Max can fit into a campaign structure: as a pure prospecting vehicle targeting people who have no existing relationship with the brand. That positioning lets advertisers ring-fence branded budget in a dedicated campaign while letting AI Max work on net-new demand, making the two campaign types additive rather than overlapping.
Google has gradually extended control options across its automated campaign formats as advertiser pressure for governance over AI-driven systems has built over the past two years. The trajectory is consistent: Performance Max gained placement exclusions and search-term reporting before advertisers considered it a trustworthy vehicle for direct-response budgets. AI Max appears to be on a similar path, with brand controls as the next practical gate before wider adoption.
The setting’s status as a limited rollout or experiment means most accounts will not see it yet. Advertisers who do see it should document the options and test carefully before assuming the control behaves identically to a manually maintained exclusion list. Attribution and impression-share data will be the clearest signals of whether the toggle is working as expected.
Teams running AI Max alongside dedicated brand campaigns should check their campaign settings now and set a calendar reminder to check again in thirty days, as a broader rollout announcement from Google, if one comes, is likely to land with little advance notice.
Reported by Anu Adegbola for Search Engine Land, published May 29, 2026.
