Microsoft Advertising switched on AI Max for Search campaigns for every advertiser worldwide on Wednesday, closing the gap with Google’s equivalent product and pushing the keyword-driven search auction another step toward an intent-inferred one. The suite bundles three features: search term matching that reads landing pages and ad copy to cover queries the keyword list misses, text customization that generates messaging variants, and final URL expansion that routes clicks to whichever page on the advertiser’s site the system judges most relevant.
The economic pitch sits inside a blog post by Carolyn Chou, director of product management for Microsoft Advertising. Across 44 advertiser A/B experiments run between June and August, Microsoft reports a spend-weighted conversion uplift of roughly 13.6 percent for campaigns with AI Max enabled, with 10 experiments statistically significant and an 8.2 percent lower confidence-interval bound. That’s a live-fire claim, not a whitepaper simulation, though the underlying accounts aren’t disclosed.
AI Max is on by default for newly created Search campaigns and can be switched off. Brand controls, term exclusions and reporting are available at launch, with up to 20 brand lists per campaign, per PPC.Land. In a LinkedIn post cited by Search Engine Roundtable, Microsoft Ads Liaison Navah Hopkins pointed operators toward those guardrails first.
For a small-team advertiser without a dedicated PPC manager, the shift is real: keyword research and copy iteration migrate to Microsoft’s models, while conversational queries typed into Bing and Copilot become reachable without a bigger term list. It also arrives days after Google’s move to charge Local Services Ads buyers for missed calls of 20 seconds or longer, tightening the paid-search economics on the other side of the duopoly. Two platforms, one direction: less operator control, more platform-priced automation.