Microsoft Advertising extended its Ad Preview Hub to Performance Max campaigns, letting advertisers see how the automated ad type has assembled their creative before any of it goes live, according to a report from Search Engine Land. The tool was previously limited to Audience Ads.
Performance Max builds ads by assembling the creative assets an advertiser uploads across Microsoft’s AI-powered inventory, using combinations the advertiser does not choose. That assembly step has been the format’s core complaint: assets go in, and combinations advertisers never approved come out already serving. Ad Preview Hub does not change the assembly. It changes when advertisers see it.
To use the feature, an advertiser opens an asset group, selects Preview ads, and reviews eligible ad formats across devices and placements before launch. From there, the advertiser can generate a secure, shareable link. Anyone holding that link, including a client or a brand-compliance reviewer, can view the preview without ever being added as a user on the Microsoft Advertising account. Microsoft says access is limited to whoever creates the link and the people that person chooses to send it to.
That link mechanic is the operationally important part. Creative sign-off on Performance Max campaigns has typically run on screenshots and third-party preview tools, workarounds built because the platform did not expose its own asset combinations before serving. A shareable, no-login link replaces that workaround with a native one, and it also lets teams spot asset pairings that read poorly together before a campaign spends against them.
Google has not announced an equivalent no-login, shareable preview link for its own Performance Max format. Advertisers running Performance Max on Google Ads are left with the same screenshot-and-third-party-tool workflow that Microsoft built this feature to replace, since Google has not published a substitute for it. On this specific transparency mechanic, the smaller ad platform has moved first.
The gain here is visibility, not control. Advertisers still cannot dictate which assets Performance Max pairs together, override a combination, or set rules for how creative gets assembled. What changes is the point at which a human sees the output: before it serves rather than after, and in a form a non-account-holder can review and approve. For agencies managing brand-compliance sign-off across multiple stakeholders, that timing shift is the entire value of the feature.
Microsoft has not published a phased rollout schedule for Ad Preview Hub on Performance Max, and the feature reads as generally available now rather than staged. Search Engine Land’s report, published July 27, does not specify which markets or account tiers have access.
Advertisers running Performance Max on both platforms should build the Microsoft preview link into client sign-off workflows now, and should flag the absence of an equivalent on Google’s side the next time a client asks why creative review looks inconsistent across the two platforms.
Search Engine Land reported the Ad Preview Hub expansion to Performance Max on July 27, 2026, in an article by Anu Adegbola.
