Count the settings in your Google Ads account that you chose yourself. Now count the ones Google chose for you. By the end of September that second number will be bigger, and nobody is going to send you anything to sign.
That is the shape of the week just gone. Three of the changes we covered between Sunday and Friday were not features you can adopt when you are ready. They were switches being moved on your behalf, on published dates, whether or not you have read the email. Here is what actually happened, what has happened since, and what is worth your Monday morning.
The three biggest changes
Google Ads starts migrating your campaigns to AI Max on 1 September
On Friday we covered the Lunio study. Four hundred million clicks, measured from October 2025 to June 2026, across Google Ads, Bing, LinkedIn, Meta and the main social platforms. Search campaigns running AI Max carried 72 percent more invalid traffic than campaigns without it. Retail search with AI Max switched on went from 2.46 percent invalid in the fourth quarter of last year to 5.28 percent by the second quarter of this one. Standard search in the very same accounts drifted down, from 3.72 to 3.07 percent.
Since then Google has confirmed the timetable rather than softened it. The migration runs from 1 to 30 September and rolls out gradually across the month. Campaigns using automatically created assets move across to AI Max with search term matching and text customisation both switched on. Campaigns using the campaign-level broad match setting move with search term matching switched on. Brand inclusions and exclusions carry over automatically. Google also stopped anyone creating new campaign-level broad match or legacy automatically created assets on 3 August, in the interface, in Editor and in the API, which tells you how settled the direction is.
Why this matters for your business: you have roughly two weeks to decide whether these campaigns should run AI Max at all, and that decision is far easier to make now than to unpick in October. Open every search campaign, note which ones use automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match, and export a clean thirty day performance baseline before 1 September. Without that baseline you will spend all of October arguing with yourself about whether performance actually changed.
Cloudflare’s new defaults can switch Googlebot off on 15 September
This one is most likely to be sitting unnoticed inside an account nobody has opened in a year. Googlebot, Bingbot and Applebot each crawl for two purposes using a single bot, for search and for AI training. Cloudflare therefore classifies them as mixed purpose. Every setting that blocks AI training now blocks those crawlers too, including the older “Block AI bots” toggle that plenty of people switched on last year and forgot about. Site owners have been reporting HTTP 403 responses on sitemap fetches.
From 15 September Cloudflare changes the defaults for new domains. Crawlers classed as Training or Agent get blocked on pages carrying ads, Search stays allowed, and mixed purpose crawlers are caught by every AI training block.
Why this matters for your business: this is a five minute check with an outsized downside. Log into Cloudflare, open the AI Crawlers and Scrapers settings for every domain you manage, and confirm Googlebot is allowed. Then open Search Console and look at crawl stats for a spike in 403 responses over the past fortnight. A site that stops being crawled does not fall out of search on the same day, which is exactly why this goes unnoticed until the recovery is slow.
Search Console’s AI report reached everyone on 11 August
The generative AI performance report went global on Tuesday, with a pop-up on the Search Console home screen pointing straight at it. It separates the impressions your pages earn inside AI Overviews and AI Mode from ordinary search impressions, and breaks them down by page, country, device and date, with a matching view for Discover.
Nothing has changed about its two limitations, and both still hold. There is no click data and no query data. And the history starts on 18 May 2026, so there is no earlier period to compare against, ever.
Why this matters for your business: this is the first honest measure of whether Google’s AI surfaces show your pages at all, so treat it as a baseline exercise rather than a reporting one. Open it this week, filter to the last twenty eight days, and save those numbers somewhere outside Search Console. In three months that saved figure is the only comparison you will have.
What turned out to be noise
Three stories looked bigger midweek than they turned out to be.
The nineteen result local pack that Joy Hawkins screenshotted on 7 August is the clearest example. Google’s Rajan Patel replied that the team had found a small bug and would fix it, and the whole thing quietly went away without a follow-up. The useful part was never the nineteen results. It was Patel declining to commit to any particular pack size at all.
Bing’s test of underlined clickable text inside organic result descriptions is the second. Clicking the underlined phrase fires a fresh Bing search rather than opening your site. Microsoft has not published the selection criteria, so there is nothing to optimise. File it as something that devalues a top ranking rather than something you can act on.
The ranking movement on 12 and 13 August is the third. It was real enough for the sites it hit, but Google has not confirmed a core update or a spam update in August at all. There have now been three separate waves of volatility this month with no announced cause behind any of them.
Why this matters for your business: the discipline worth keeping is to wait a few days before rebuilding anything around a screenshot. Two of these three had already disappeared by Friday.
Automotive
Dealers took the week harder than most, because two of the changes land directly on how vehicle stock gets advertised and measured.
The AI Max migration is the expensive one. Model and variant keywords carry real cost per click, so a wasted click on a dealer group costs several times what the same wasted click costs a small retailer selling one product. Dealer groups also tend to run broad match across every rooftop, which is precisely the configuration Google is converting. The measurement problem is the sharper half of it. An invalid click still lands on the vehicle detail page and still fires the page view, so your traffic report looks healthier while nobody books a test drive and cost per lead climbs.
Merchant Center is the second. On 24 August Google aligns its Merchant Center performance metric definitions with Google Ads and YouTube, and splits YouTube affiliate results out from the rest. There is no opt out and no action required. Vehicle ads run on Merchant Center feeds, so the first month on month comparison after 24 August measures the definition change rather than your performance.
Underneath all of that, demand is holding up well. Naamsa reported 57,708 new vehicles sold in July, up 11.9 percent on July last year, with 40,912 passenger cars, the strongest passenger month since September 2014.
Why this matters for your dealership: the market is handing you buyers, so your risk this month is measurement rather than demand. Before 1 September, audit which rooftop campaigns use broad match and decide deliberately instead of letting the migration decide. Before 24 August, screenshot your Merchant Center numbers so you have the old definitions on record. And stop reporting vehicle detail page views as though they prove intent, because that is the exact metric an invalid click inflates.
Still unresolved
Four things go into next week genuinely open. Google has still not confirmed any core or spam update behind three waves of August volatility. Meta has still not publicly admitted it is building a search engine, though its own crawler climbed from roughly 2 percent of tracked AI crawler requests to nearly 38 percent between mid July and 9 August, which is a hard number to explain any other way. The Search Console AI report still carries no clicks and no queries, with no stated plan to add them. And Cloudflare has published what happens to new domains on 15 September without being clear about existing ones.
What to do this week
- Audit every search campaign for automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match, then export a thirty day baseline before 1 September
- Review any campaign that is limited by budget and beating its target, because the 17 August bidding change turns a loose target into real spending
- Open Cloudflare’s AI Crawlers and Scrapers settings on every domain and confirm Googlebot is allowed
- Open the Search Console generative AI report, filter to the last twenty eight days and save the numbers outside the tool
- Screenshot your Merchant Center performance figures before 24 August
- Plan your WordPress updates, because version 7.1 is due on 19 August at WordCamp US
If you would rather somebody else worked through that list on your accounts, this is what we do every week. Get in touch and we will take a look.
Sources
- Maple Leaf Agency, AI Max Carries 72% More Invalid Traffic, 14 August 2026
- Maple Leaf Agency, Your Next Customer Might Never Touch Your Booking Form, 13 August 2026
- Maple Leaf Agency, Search and Social Update, 12 August 2026
- Maple Leaf Agency, Search and Social Update, 11 August 2026
- Maple Leaf Agency, Google Ads Starts Locking Gmail Accounts Out, 10 August 2026
- Maple Leaf Agency, Search and Social Update, 9 August 2026
- Search Engine Land, Google sets AI Max migration timeline for Search campaigns
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Ads To Migrate Automatically Created Assets and Campaign-Level Broad Match To AI Max September 1
- Search Engine Journal, Cloudflare’s AI Crawler Rules Can Block Googlebot
- Cloudflare, Your site, your rules, new AI traffic options for all customers
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Search Console Generative AI Performance Report Live For All
- Google Search Console Help, Generative AI performance report
- Google Ads Help, Changes to target based bid strategies
- Search Engine Roundtable, Meta Crawling Web and May Be Building Search Engine
- Business Day, South Africa’s new-car sales hit 12-year high in July