Google is upping the Google Tax today. AI is the weapon - AI Max goes auto on.

From today, Google is auto-upgrading Search campaigns to AI Max. Automatically created assets, or campaign-level broad match, and you convert. Only ticked auto headlines? You still get query expansion unless you switch it off at ad-group level.

Working in AI and marketing you occasionally see things other people miss. This is one of them. Released in August with almost no fanfare. Only the PPC nerds will pick it up, and I mean that with respect. The world needs more PPC nerds.

Anyone who reads me knows Performance Max is a bête noire. AI Max is the cousin. Same family. Same instinct. The platform decides what you buy and lowers the transparency.

What is actually going on is simple. Google is pushing reach over precision. It is widening the pool of queries so it can widen the pool of your money. Across thousands of advertisers the reliable outcome is more spend in Google, less with the tax-paying publishers who still make the content. The net benefit is Google's, not yours.

AI Max has a place. If you want new areas to go, campaign expansion, it is a genuine tool that can boost growth. It also costs you though, reliable copy and precision control of the account which can mean lower incrementally, lower quality wasted funds. Google has now helpfully, and I do mean that ironically, turned the settings up without so much as a by your leave. If you are not ready, it will eat your shirt.

Being ready is not a vibe, most people think their account is ready and most are wrong. It needs real discipline only the best setup accounts have. It is account structure, brand and URL controls, negatives that still mean something, and someone watching the search terms this week like they mean it. Ecommerce with a clean feed is not lead gen with URL expansion left on. Different impact. Different mitigations. Different ways to take the actual benefit, the coverage you would never type, without donating the rest of the plan.

But this is not a post about AI Max. It is a post about the fair use of AI tools.

This is more evidence that Google will do anything to push its own profits. It is the ratchet pressure of a public company. Since generative AI arrived as both an opportunity and a threat to Google, that ratchet has sped up. Remember when people wondered if AI would take Google's search share and the share price wobbled. Google made sure the damage landed in natural search and did not kill the cash cow. Businesses in every sector felt it. Publishers especially. Chartbeat, in the Reuters Institute report: Google search referrals to publishers down a third globally in the year to November 2025. In the US, 38%.

This is a similar move in the same direction. It includes people lazily typing a company name into the browser and being bounced into a paid ad. That is the equivalent of putting bouncers up and down the high street who take cash out of the till every time someone walks into the shop.

Every year the invoice goes up. Search CPC has more than doubled in a decade, $2.32 to $5.42. Brand terms, the ones that used to be free or nearly free, are in on it. Tinuiti clocked a 19% jump in brand CPCs in a single quarter last year. The bouncer point. A Google Tax on doing business. It is like the mafia, and I use that word on purpose, because they make it a requirement to send them all your data via CAPI, knowing that if you don't you will be punished on customer acquisition cost.

We have the publisher monopoly remedies coming from the DOJ. I have long since given up on the regulator fixing this before the horse has bolted. Google have their own product in that space too, Demand Gen, folding Display into an AI campaign type. It is early and frankly a bit shit. Done right it could still chew through the independent display market.

GDPR in Europe, and the various US and global privacy bills, made this easier. They punished the independent, tax-paying sector and left the one party with the login graph standing.So if that is the problem, what is the solution, while we wait for the regulatory train that will not come.

Every advertiser needs their own AI brain to help them mange the chaos and complexity of the marketing world . Not Google's. Google has shown it does not work for you. It works for itself. So you need your own brain to hold Google (and Meta etc) to account. As I always say, dont trust verify and use your own AI brain to scale that.

That brain has two jobs. Find alternatives to putting the money straight back into Google: independent publishers, Reddit, Pinterest, Spotify, Amazon, the TV networks, all still cheaper than the duopoly if you are willing to do the work. And manage Google's own changes properly. They always leave a gap, a toggle, an ad-group switch-off. That is not kindness. That is how they punish the customers who trust them most.

Do not be that customer.

You will pay the Google Tax. Sadly. Pay it on your terms, and with a plan B.