Google's AI writes your ads: how to review the texts

Google Ads can write headlines and descriptions for your ads based on your website and your existing ads. Customers see these texts under your name, just like the lines you wrote yourselves. That can give you ads that fit more searches without anyone writing every line. At the same time, it means your ads contain things that nobody at your company has read.

The responsibility stays with you. According to Google, the advertising policies apply to all content regardless of how it was created. On the help page on text customization, Google also writes that you need to make sure your website is accurate and not misleading. That is where the texts come from, so an out-of-date page can end up in an ad.

My recommendation is that you decide campaign by campaign whether Google may write, and that someone reads the generated texts every week. It is the only way to know what your customers are actually reading.

Where Google writes in your name

The feature appears in several places in the account and goes by slightly different names.

• Text customization in Search campaigns was formerly called automatically created assets. Google writes extra headlines and descriptions based on the landing page, the domain, your ads and the keywords in the ad group. If you switch on AI Max for a Search campaign, text customization is switched on at the same time.
• Text customization in Performance Max is on from the start. Google writes headlines and descriptions based on the landing page, the domain and the assets you have added.
• Dynamic search ads take their headline from the content on your website.
• Account level automated assets include sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets that Google creates from your website. If you have several offices, the sitelinks can lead to the wrong office.
• Auto-applied recommendations can add new headlines and descriptions to your responsive search ads if the recommendation to improve them is applied automatically.

According to Google's help page on Performance Max, the generated texts are shown when the system predicts they will perform better. That is not the same as them matching what you offer. Which languages the features work in has also changed over time, so check Google's help pages for what applies to the languages in your campaigns.

What can go wrong

Most generated lines are harmless. The review looks for the few that are not.

• Offers that have ended but are still on an old page.
• Prices, delivery times or warranties that apply to a different product from the one the ad is about.
• Words and claims you would never use yourselves.
• Lines that answer a different search intent from the ad group's.
• Wording that is allowed in general but not in your industry.

An example: an online shop still has a page about free delivery from a promotion that has ended. Google may then write a headline about free delivery, and it shows until someone spots it. I explain why every line should answer that particular search in the post on one ad text per search intent.

How to find the texts Google has written

The generated texts appear in the asset report. There is a column and a filter that show whether an asset was added by you or by Google.

1. Open the assets for the campaign or for a single ad.
2. Add a filter on the column that shows the source of the asset and select the assets Google created.
3. Read the headlines and descriptions one at a time.
4. Remove any single asset that is wrong. You can do this without switching the feature off.

The combinations report also shows which combinations of headlines and descriptions have actually been shown and whether they included texts from Google. That is where you see the ad as the customer saw it.

Our review routine

This is what the routine looks like when we review an account where Google is allowed to write. It follows the same steps every week so that nothing is skipped.

1. Go through which campaigns have text customization switched on. Do not forget Performance Max, where it is on from the start.
2. Filter for the assets Google has added and compare with last week's log so you can see which ones are new.
3. Read every new line against the landing page the ad leads to.
4. Remove lines that promise something you do not offer or that sound wrong for your company.
5. Fix the source. Update or remove old pages on the website and exclude URLs that Google should not use.
6. Check which recommendations are applied automatically and switch off the types that change your ads without anyone reading them.
7. Write down what you removed and why.

My assessment is that step five makes the biggest difference over time. If you only remove a wrong line, Google may write a similar line from the same page. If you fix the page, the cause goes away. Sometimes it is the website that needs attention first, and we help with that as part of our web and landing pages service.

Both Performance Max and AI Max have settings for excluding URLs. There you list pages the ads should not lead to. These can be job ads, terms and old promotion pages. You switch off the account level automated assets type by type in their own settings.

Should Google be allowed to write your ads?

There is no answer that suits everyone. My assessment is that text customization does the most good when the website is up to date and the campaign gets many different searches that your own texts cannot keep up with. It does the least good when your own texts are already written for each search intent and when every word in the ad has to be approved in advance.

Two things are worth knowing before you decide. Text customization can be switched off per campaign, but in AI Max this also switches off final URL expansion, because it requires text customization. When AI Max sends the visitor to a different landing page from the one you set, the headlines you have pinned to a particular position are not used either. This is stated on Google's help page on AI Max.

In Performance Max you have less control over the texts than in an ordinary Search campaign. I go through the difference in the post on Standard Shopping and Performance Max. Reviewing the texts also fits well into a wider review of the account, and I describe how that works in the post on how we audit a Google Ads account.

Your next step

Open the asset report for your largest campaign together with whoever runs the account and go through these questions.

1. Which campaigns have text customization switched on, and was that a decision someone made?
2. Which headlines and descriptions has Google written in the past month?
3. Does every line match what the landing page says?
4. Who will read the texts from now on, and how often?

We go through what Google has written in your name, remove what is wrong and set up a weekly review with a log you can read yourselves. It is part of how we work with Google Ads.

Do you know which headlines Google showed in your ads last week?