Your brand conversions slipped, and the Performance Max dashboard still looks fine. Your agency says give it a few more weeks.
That’s the wrong read. Google just added a line to its help docs saying PMax may filter out brand queries and hand them to dedicated Search campaigns. If nothing is built to catch that traffic, your Performance Max brand search volume is landing somewhere you aren’t looking.
Google’s subtle documentation update means Performance Max can no longer be relied on to passively capture brand search traffic. Relying on default settings leaves your highest-converting queries exposed to competitors or budget bottlenecks. By systematically auditing search terms, securing exact match brand keywords, and isolating brand metrics in your reporting, you regain control over your account’s performance and ensure your ad dollars drive true incremental growth.
Google’s help page on how Performance Max interacts with other campaigns picked up a new paragraph. It says PMax “may also filter out navigational or brand-specific search queries” and prioritize serving them through dedicated Search campaigns.
Read that again. People typing your name, your domain or your product line are the easiest traffic you’ll ever get. Google is now telling you Performance Max may step aside for them.
Here’s what the page doesn’t say. It doesn’t say how much gets filtered, when it happens, or what rule decides. “May” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Google’s advice is short. Give your dedicated brand search campaign enough budget and good, eligible ads. And consider adding Search Themes to the Performance Max campaign.
If PMax steps aside and nothing steps in, nobody shows the ad.
There’s no notification for this. No warning banner, no email. Your PMax brand queries just drift out of one campaign, and whether they show up in another depends on how you built your account.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Three kinds of accounts take the hit first:
Each of those can hide for years while PMax quietly picks up the slack. Once it stops, an ad that isn’t funded or eligible doesn’t serve. Your own name can become open ground for a competitor bidding on it.
Cheap clicks are still clicks you can lose.
Now the part most people miss. Brand traffic is demand you’ve already earned. Performance Max is supposed to find demand you haven’t.
If brand queries sat inside your PMax campaign, they did some of the work your report credited to everything else. Someone who types your name into Google is already halfway to buying. Converting them says very little about how well PMax finds new customers.
So when brand queries move out, PMax numbers may drop, and that drop could be the first honest read you’ve had. Don’t answer it by raising the budget. Don’t panic and kill the campaign either.
The real question is whether the account as a whole is bringing in more customers. Brand search and PMax now share the job, so they get judged together.
Judge the account, not the campaign.
Seven steps. The order matters, because each one tells you whether the next is worth doing.
In Google Ads, open the Campaigns menu, go to Insights and reports, and open the Search terms report. Then pick “Search terms and landing pages for Performance Max” from the dropdown, as Google’s walkthrough of the Performance Max search terms report explains.
Filter for your brand name, your domain and your common misspellings. Compare the last 30 days to the 30 before. Write down brand clicks and conversions inside PMax.
That’s your baseline. You can’t fix a leak you haven’t measured.
Open your brand search campaign and add two columns: Search lost IS (budget) and Search lost IS (rank). On your own name, you want close to zero lost on both.
Then check ad status. Look for disapprovals, limited ads and anything marked ineligible.
If your own name isn’t winning, fix that before anything else.
Google’s own rule is that a Search campaign keyword that exactly matches, or is spell-corrected to, a person’s query gets preferred over PMax. That sits on the same help page as the new paragraph.
So use it. Add exact match keywords for your brand name, your domain, your product lines and the misspellings you actually see in your search terms report.
Exact match is the one tie-breaker Google already gave you in writing.
Brand clicks are cheap, so brand budgets get set low and forgotten. Check the campaign status for “limited by budget.”
If PMax hands more brand queries over, the volume lands here. Size the budget for that volume, not last year’s. These are the most efficient clicks in your account.
A capped brand budget is a self-inflicted outage.
Waiting for Google’s filter to decide for you is a weak plan. Brand exclusions are Google’s recommended control when you manage brand traffic in a separate campaign and don’t want PMax paying for those clicks. They cover Search and Shopping ads in PMax, and you can let Shopping ads keep serving on those terms.
Our take: if you run a real brand campaign, make the split on purpose. Add the exclusions, watch total brand volume for two weeks, and keep Shopping on if you sell products.
Moving campaign types? Brand exclusions need mapping by hand. We covered that in moving from DSA to AI Max without losing leads.
Decide the split yourself, or Google decides it for you.
Google suggests adding Search Themes to the Performance Max campaign. Fair. Just know what they are. Search themes are a broad signal to Google’s AI, not keywords. Google recommends up to 50, broad rather than long-tail, with no overlapping duplicates.
There’s a catch. Google also says themes work best when they add information the AI can’t get from your site. Your brand name already lives on your site.
So treat PMax search themes as insurance. Add your brand and product-line terms as a backstop, and don’t count on them.
The brand search campaign is the plan. Themes are the hedge.
If your report blends everything, a PMax dip looks like failure and a brand campaign jump looks like a win. Neither tells you the truth.
Build one view with brand and non-brand separated, across both PMax and Search. Tie it to real orders or leads, not just platform conversions. Our business and website analytics and dashboard development work is built for exactly this.
You can’t judge a split you can’t see.
Every engagement at THEMAYK opens with a documented audit, not a hunch. We fix tracking and funnel leaks before a single dollar goes into ads, and most clients see their first measurable lift within 60 to 90 days.
Owais Khatri leads paid media across Google and Meta here. Separating brand queries from everything else is the kind of check we build into every Google Ads and search campaign audit. And if your ROAS looks healthy while the bank account doesn’t, start with where your ad budget is leaking.
If your brand traffic moved and nobody told you, let’s find where it landed. Book a free strategy call at www.themayk.com. In 30 minutes we review your brand, funnel and ad spend, then send a written summary whether or not you hire us.
Stop guessing. Start growing.
Google’s subtle documentation update means Performance Max can no longer be relied on to passively capture brand search traffic. Relying on default settings leaves your highest-converting queries exposed to competitors or budget bottlenecks. By systematically auditing search terms, securing exact match brand keywords, funding dedicated campaigns, and isolating brand metrics in your reporting, you regain control over your account’s performance and ensure your ad dollars drive true incremental growth.
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