Google keeps nudging advertisers toward AI Max in Search campaigns, and adoption keeps growing. The hard part comes later, when you try to figure out how many of your leads came from AI Max and how many came from the keywords you built yourself. The answer is already inside Google Ads. You just need to know which rows to read.
- AI Max conversions come from two buckets, expanded matches and landing page matches, and adding them together shows how much of a campaign runs outside your keyword plan.
- The summary rows in the Keywords tab give cleaner totals for this math than the Search Terms report, which can hide a big slice of activity under Other search terms.
- Tracking AI Max share of conversions weekly by campaign shows you where a closer query review makes sense.
How AI Max Reaches Past Your Keyword List
AI Max gives Google more room to find searches outside your existing keyword list. Armen Sargsyan, co-founder of the digital advertising agency 405 Ads, describes it as feeling like a more aggressive take on broad match. The difference is that it also pulls from your landing pages and other campaign signals.
Google splits that extra reach into two groups. Expanded matches are searches Google finds by stretching past your keywords. Landing page matches are searches tied to your landing pages and assets, even when they fall outside your normal keyword targeting.
For a dealership, that could mean a campaign built around specific model names starting to show up for searches nobody ever added to the account. Add the two buckets together and you can see how much of that campaign is being steered by Google’s expansion instead of the structure you set up.
Why the Search Terms Report Falls Short Here
The trouble is that part of the activity gets lumped into a row called Other search terms. Sargsyan has seen that group make up 40% or even 50% of total search activity in some accounts. With that much tucked out of view, you can’t get a reliable percentage of AI Max conversions from visible queries alone.
The Keywords Tab Has the Totals You Need
Open a campaign, click the Keywords tab, and scroll to the bottom of the table. Google shows a few summary rows there, including Total: Your keywords, Total: AI Max expanded matches, and Total: AI Max landing page matches. All of them roll up into Total: Campaign.
The math is simple. Add the expanded match conversions to the landing page match conversions to get total AI Max conversions. Then divide that by total campaign conversions. If a campaign logged 100 conversions and 24 came from the two AI Max rows combined, AI Max accounts for 24% of that campaign.
Pulling Every Campaign Into One Sheet
Sargsyan’s team wrote a Google Ads script to handle the busywork. It’s an analyst-built workaround, so you won’t find it as an official Google dashboard. The script grabs total conversions for each Search campaign, pulls the conversions tied to the two AI Max match sources, and writes everything to a spreadsheet in Google Drive.
The sheet lists campaign name, total conversions, expanded matches, landing page matches, total AI Max conversions, and AI Max % of total. It skips campaigns with no AI Max conversions, sorts the rest by percentage, and adds a total row at the bottom. You set the date range inside the script.
Put AI Max Share on Your Weekly Checklist
Sargsyan suggests checking this number weekly and comparing it campaign by campaign. Combing through every AI Max query every week just turns into noise. When one campaign’s share climbs in a meaningful way, start there and open the AI Max search terms with a few questions in mind.
- Are the queries relevant to what the campaign sells?
- Are they converting at an acceptable cost per acquisition?
- Is Google finding useful query themes you weren’t targeting before, or is the expansion getting too aggressive?
The metric can also help explain swings. If results shift and AI Max share rose at the same time, you have a lead worth chasing. Maybe AI Max found valuable extra volume. Maybe it wandered into broader auctions with less efficient traffic. Maybe nothing is wrong at all. The number won’t raise results on its own, but it tells your marketing team or agency where to spend review time, so the campaigns that changed get attention first.
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