Google Ads deprecations 2026 and 2027: the full timeline

Between August 2026 and the end of 2027 Google is removing campaign level language targeting from Search, shutting down the Content API for Shopping, auto migrating campaign broad match and Dynamic Search Ads into AI Max, folding standalone Display and Travel campaigns into other campaign types, and cutting how long it keeps reporting data. The three dates closest to today are 17 August 2026, when budget limited campaigns on target based bidding stop overachieving their targets, 18 August 2026, when the Content API for Shopping is switched off, and 31 August 2026, when local inventory ads turn on by default in every Shopping campaign.

What follows is a single consolidated timeline of the Google Ads deprecations, forced migrations and definition changes Google has published for 2026 and 2027, grouped by the part of the account each one touches. Every item names its first party source and the date that source was published, because several of these dates moved after the first announcement and one pair of Google pages still contradicts the other.

The dates that bite first

Four changes land in August 2026. Three of them change numbers rather than settings, which is exactly why they get missed: nothing in the account looks different, but a report does.

Search campaign structure

The largest group of changes rebuilds how a Search campaign is assembled. The campaign level language targeting setting is removed from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns in late September 2026. The Google Ads Developer Blog post of 13 August 2026, credited to Dora Sun, puts it plainly: "For Search and AI Max for Search campaigns, the campaign-level language targeting setting will be removed." Matching moves to the language of your ads and landing pages together with Google's understanding of the languages a user reads, and where several of your campaigns are eligible for the same query, an AI based ad group prioritisation step decides between them.

Performance Max keeps the setting, but only in part. The same post says the campaign level language setting stops applying on Google Search inventory while continuing to apply on YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. In the Google Ads API, language criteria stay readable on Search campaigns, but a mutate on one returns ContextError.OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT, while the same mutate on a Performance Max campaign returns no error at all.

What that means in practice: stop setting language criteria on new Search campaigns, since the setting is on its way out, and treat cleanup of existing criteria as optional rather than required work. Make each ad group's copy and its landing page unambiguously one language, because that is the signal Google reads instead. If two campaigns existed only to hold Thai and English apart, rebuild the separation at ad group and creative level, then watch which ad group wins a bilingual query in the first weeks after the change.

Creation of new campaign level broad match configurations and legacy standalone automatically created assets was blocked on 3 August 2026. The Developer Blog post of 12 August 2026 by Bob Hancock states: "Creating new Campaign-level Broad Match configurations or legacy Automatically Created Assets (ACA) is now blocked across the UI, Google Ads Editor, and all versions of the API." Existing configurations keep running until they are migrated.

Phase 1 of the automatic migration to AI Max runs progressively from 1 September to 30 September 2026. Campaigns that used campaign level broad match arrive with Text Customization off, Final URL Expansion off, Search Term Matching on, and brand lists preserved. Campaigns that used automatically created assets arrive with Text Customization on, Final URL Expansion off and Search Term Matching on. The detail worth pinning down is that Search Term Matching is switched on for you in both cases, so the set of queries a campaign can reach widens on the day it migrates. Querying campaign.aca_migration_date_time and campaign.broad_match_migration_date_time in GAQL shows which campaigns are in scope and when, and the sensible follow up is to re-check negative keyword coverage and brand lists in the days after each campaign moves.

Phase 2 covers Dynamic Search Ads and runs later. The same post describes pre migration banners in the interface from September 2026, an official reminder on 15 January 2027, and a window of 1 to 28 February 2027 during which creation of new DSA ad groups is permanently removed and unmigrated DSA campaigns are upgraded to standard Search ad groups with AI Max switched on. A voluntary one click path already exists under Campaign Settings, Dynamic Search Ads, "Upgrade Your Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) to AI Max", which is the option to take if you would rather choose your own moment for the relearning period.

Two first party Google pages disagree here, so both get reported. Google Ads Help answer 13389795 still says DSA, ACA and campaign broad match all auto upgrade "starting September 2026". The Developer Blog post of 12 August 2026 is the newer of the two and the more specific: it separates the three, and it says legacy DSA campaigns are excluded from the September auto migrations, with DSA rescheduled to February 2027. The Help page appears not to have been updated to match. Plan against February 2027 for DSA, but do not be surprised by a September banner in the interface.

Two smaller items sit in the same group. New Smart campaigns cannot be created since 3 August 2026, according to the Google Ads API feature deprecations page; existing ones keep serving and can still be edited, and the API returns SmartCampaignError.CREATION_FAILED on v24 and above, or OperationAccessDeniedError.CREATE_OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED on v23 and earlier. Call only ads reach end of life on a longer arc: creation was removed in February 2026, and Google Ads Help, in "Action Required: Transition from call ads to call assets", says existing call only ads stop receiving impressions in February 2027. The replacement is a responsive search ad carrying call assets. Any ad group whose only ad is a call only ad goes dark on that date, so the work is to add responsive search ads and call assets in those ad groups first. Google published no regional carve out for this one, which means Thai accounts running call only ads are inside it.

On the API side, legacy campaign broad match and ACA entities are removed from any Google Ads API version released after 1 September 2026. Older versions keep them until their own sunsets, which Google approximates as around September 2027, at which point, in its wording, all remaining legacy entities will be permanently removed.

Bidding and budgets

From 17 August 2026, budget limited campaigns using target based bid strategies stop systematically overachieving their target. Google Ads Help, on the page about changes to target based bid strategies, says campaigns will "more consistently perform toward your bid target, including when you make budget adjustments". This covers Target CPA and Target ROAS including ad group level target overrides, on Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, Hotel and Travel campaigns, and it applies across Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Display and Video 360, Google Ads Editor and the API. App campaigns, Video reach campaigns and Video view campaigns are excluded. Display and Hotel campaigns already behaved this way.

The practical effect on a budget limited account is that a campaign which had been delivering a CPA well under its Target CPA, because the budget throttled it into only the cheapest auctions, can drift up toward the stated target and spend the same money on more expensive conversions. Google makes no automatic adjustment to your targets. There is a Bid Target Adjustment Tool, available since 6 July 2026, offering four options: keep the target as it is, reset it to recent actual performance, set a custom target, or change bid strategy. The audit to run before the date is short. List the campaigns that are budget limited, compare each one's actual CPA or ROAS over the last 30 days against its stated target, and decide deliberately which of those four options each campaign gets.

One correction belongs here, because it is still widely listed as an upcoming deprecation. Enhanced CPC is not pending. It ended in the week of 31 March 2025 for Search and Display, and nothing further about it is scheduled. What deserves a look is the residue: campaigns that were never proactively migrated now behave as Manual CPC, which in most accounts is not what anyone chose.

Campaign types folded into other campaign types

Standalone Display campaigns are being retired into Demand Gen, under the name GDN on Demand Gen, with the migration tool phased in from June 2026. Google dates the creation block and the forced automatic migration only as "Coming later", with no month and no year attached, and says: "Remaining eligible Google Display Ads campaigns will be automatically migrated to GDN on Demand Gen campaigns without any advertiser action." Some trade coverage puts the creation block in January 2027. The first party Help page gives no date at all, so January 2027 should be treated as unconfirmed.

The feature losses matter more than the missing date. After the move Google lists as unsupported: Manual CPC, optimisation toward viewable impressions, pay for conversions, bid adjustments, seasonality adjustments, portfolio bidding, Brand Lift and Search Lift. Combined audiences and non demographic observation settings are unsupported, and content suitability exclusions become account level only. The argument for migrating yourself rather than waiting sits in the tool itself: Google says it carries over up to 42 days of performance history and holds relearning to roughly one to two days, which is a better outcome than an automatic migration arriving in the middle of a peak trading week.

Travel campaigns move into new Search campaigns for Travel starting Q3 2026, according to the in product Google Ads Help notice reproduced by Search Engine Roundtable. Google publishes no specific date and tells advertisers to watch account notifications and email. The new campaigns are created automatically, mirroring the closest equivalent settings. If you migrate by hand instead, pause the existing Things to do campaigns after the new Travel campaign is active, so the two are not bidding at the same time.

Local Services Ads move into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay per lead goals, on a phased schedule. Google Ads Help puts United States plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving in August 2026; broader groups including service area businesses in late 2026; and non US accounts and remaining categories in 2027. Three details deserve attention. First, Google states: "Once your account is migrated, you will no longer be able to access your original Local Services Ads dashboard," and historical LSA reports do not transfer, so every report has to be exported before the migration date. Second, weekly budgets convert to daily averages, calculated as the historical weekly average divided by 7, with monthly spend capped at the daily budget multiplied by 30.4. Third, manual cost per lead bidding and vertical level Target CPA are deprecated in favour of a single campaign level Target CPA. Google says it announces your migration date 14 days in advance, and that notice period is the whole window you get for the export.

Shopping and Merchant Center

The Content API for Shopping shut down on 18 August 2026 and is replaced by Merchant API v1. Google Merchant Center Help describes "access to the Content API until August 18, 2026, after which the Content API will be shut down". Merchants who upload products only by file, scheduled URL fetch or Google Sheets are unaffected. If a third party feed tool, an ERP connector or a custom script writes your products, confirm the vendor has migrated, because the failure mode is a feed that silently stops updating rather than an error anyone sees in the interface. For retailers, this is a data pipeline check rather than an ads task, and it belongs with the rest of the ecommerce marketing plumbing.

From 31 August 2026 local inventory ads are on by default for all Shopping campaigns. The Developer Blog announcement of 20 July 2026 says Campaign.ShoppingSetting.enable_local stops having any effect and is force overridden to true, and that on API v25.1 and above, setting it to false throws ContextError.OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT. Channel control moves to the Inventory filter, which is a listing scope criterion with product_channel set to ONLINE, or the Inventory filter in campaign settings. The change is scoped by whether the linked Merchant Center account carries the local inventory ads add on, which is itself country dependent. If online and local budgets were deliberately siloed by leaving local switched off, rebuild that split with the Inventory filter before 31 August, or the two merge into one pot.

Merchant Center performance reporting is redefined on 24 August 2026, and Google will restate historical data back to 1 July 2026. The announcement of 11 August 2026 lists four changes: YouTube affiliate traffic becomes its own interaction type and leaves the Organic bucket, YouTube organic click and impression definitions are realigned, ads product level reporting expands to all ads channels and formats, and a new Network segmentation dimension is added. Reported organic traffic can drop in a single step because of this. Tell whoever reads the monthly numbers before 24 August that the drop is a definition change rather than a demand change, and rebuild any dashboard that hard codes the old Organic definition. The same warning is worth passing to whoever owns your analytics reporting, so the two sets of numbers still tell one story.

Two smaller Merchant Center items close the group. In September 2026 Shopping ads policies and free listings policies merge into one set in the Merchant Center Help Center; Google states the change is organisational rather than substantive, so the only action is re-bookmarking internal policy references, since URLs and structure change. And from 30 September 2026 pickup cost and minimum order value become required attributes for in store products enabled for pickup, in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and all EEA countries only. That last one explicitly does not apply to Thailand.

Reporting and data retention

Google cut its data retention with effect from 1 June 2026. Hourly, daily and weekly reporting data is retained for 37 months. Monthly, quarterly and annual data is retained for 11 years. Reach and frequency metrics are retained for three years only. Past those limits the data is not accessible through the Google Ads interface or through the APIs, and the cut reaches Google Ads scripts, the Google Analytics Data API and the BigQuery Data Transfer Service. Nothing replaces it and there is no archive to request afterwards.

The response is warehousing, and it has to happen before the data ages out rather than when someone asks for it. Any account that reports on hour of day, day of week or year over year seasonality at daily granularity needs those pulls stored outside Google. Video and awareness accounts should look at the three year reach and frequency limit first, since that is the shortest window on the list and the history is the hardest to reconstruct.

Access, authentication and API plumbing

Passkeys became required for Google Ads API user authentication on 5 August 2026, rolling out, in Google's phrasing, over the next few weeks. The Developer Blog post of 27 July 2026 says new OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens can only be generated with a passkey, and that password only sign in, TOTP and SMS two factor are not accepted for this purpose. Existing refresh tokens keep working, and service account workflows are unaffected. The reach is wider than it first looks: Google Ads Editor, Google Ads scripts, the BigQuery Data Transfer Service and Looker Studio connections that go through the API are all in scope. Create the passkeys before you need them, because a seven day security delay can apply before a new passkey is trusted, and that delay lands at the worst possible moment if a token has already expired.

Multi party approvals for sensitive Google Ads API actions started on 27 July 2026 and rolled out over the following weeks. Inviting a user, updating permissions or revoking access can now be held pending a second administrator's approval. Two things follow. Every account needs a second administrator who exists and responds, and any tool that manages access has to handle a pending state instead of assuming the change took effect immediately.

Version 21 of the Google Ads API was sunset on 5 August 2026, and all v21 requests begin to fail. The published timetable for the versions after it is below, taken from the Google Ads API deprecation and sunset page last updated on 3 August 2026. Google's own caveat is worth repeating: "The tentative date means that the sunset could happen any time in that month, and the dates could change."

One more API item catches accounts that stopped using a feature rather than accounts that use it daily. Developer tokens that sent no offline conversion upload requests between 17 December 2025 and 15 June 2026 now receive CUSTOMER_NOT_ALLOWLISTED_FOR_THIS_FEATURE from UploadClickConversions. The replacement path is the Data Manager API. If offline conversion imports are part of how you measure lead quality and they have been dormant since last year, the upload fails the first time you try to restart it, which is a bad thing to discover in the middle of a quarter end review.

The Limited Ad Serving policy expansion

Google is expanding the Limited Ad Serving policy from a Search specific policy to one covering all of Google Ads. Its wording: "In August 2026, Google will update its Limited Ad Serving policy to cover all Google Ads. Implementation will begin gradually and will be completed by 2028." Under this policy Google limits how often an advertiser's ads are shown rather than disapproving the ads outright, which is why it is easy to mistake for weak performance. The surfaces named are Search, YouTube, Gmail, Play Store and Discover, and the accounts hit hardest are newer ones, unverified advertisers and accounts with weak trust signals.

The defence is advertiser verification completed, a clean policy compliance record, and branding clear enough that the business behind the account is obvious. When an account is limited there is an in account notification, and appeals go through the Limited Ad Serving Appeals Form.

What to do before each of the next three deadlines

For 17 August 2026 and target based bidding:

1. List every budget limited campaign on Target CPA or Target ROAS, including ad group level target overrides.
2. Compare each campaign's actual 30 day CPA or ROAS against its stated target.
3. Where actual performance is far better than the target, decide between holding the target and resetting it to recent actual performance in the Bid Target Adjustment Tool.
4. Annotate the date in your reporting, so a CPA that rises afterwards is not investigated as an account fault.

For 18 August 2026 and the Content API for Shopping:

1. Identify every system that writes to Merchant Center: feed tools, ERP connectors, custom scripts.
2. Ask each vendor in writing whether it has moved to Merchant API v1.
3. After the date, check the last update timestamp on your products rather than trusting the absence of an error message.

For 31 August 2026 and local inventory ads:

1. Check whether the linked Merchant Center account has the local inventory ads add on. If it does not, this item does not reach you.
2. If it does, list the Shopping campaigns where local was deliberately switched off.
3. Recreate the online only scope with an Inventory filter set to product_channel ONLINE before the date, not after it.

What this means for advertisers in Thailand

Only two items on this page carry an explicit regional scope. The Local Services Ads migration starts with United States verticals, moves to broader groups in late 2026, and reaches non US accounts and remaining categories in 2027, which puts a Thai account in the later wave. The Merchant Center pickup cost and minimum order value requirement applies in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and all EEA countries only, and does not apply to Thailand.

Every other item is silent on geography. Google published no regional carve out for the language targeting removal, the AI Max migrations, the bidding change, the Content API shutdown, the data retention cut, the passkey requirement or the Limited Ad Serving expansion. The reasonable planning assumption is that a Thailand based account is treated like any other account.

Two of them have a sharper edge for bilingual accounts. The removal of campaign level language targeting matters most where Thai and English ads were kept in separate campaigns for that reason alone, since the separation now has to be carried by the copy and the landing page. A Thai landing page with English navigation and mixed body copy is a weaker signal than a page that is wholly in one language, so the fix is editorial rather than structural. The AI Max migrations then switch Search Term Matching on, which widens the query set a campaign can reach. Thai queries mix scripts, transliterate brand names and run together without spaces, so a negative list built around exact and phrase keywords may not hold once matching widens. Re-checking negatives in the days after each migration date is the cheapest safeguard available, and it is the same discipline that stops paid search and Thai language SEO from buying the same clicks twice.

Frequently asked questions

When does campaign level language targeting go away?

Late September 2026 for Search and AI Max for Search campaigns, according to the Google Ads Developer Blog post of 13 August 2026. Google gave the month rather than a specific day, so anyone quoting an exact date for it is guessing. Performance Max keeps the setting on YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail, and loses it only on Google Search inventory.

What replaces campaign level broad match?

AI Max for Search replaces it, with campaigns auto migrating between 1 September and 30 September 2026 and arriving with Text Customization off, Final URL Expansion off and Search Term Matching on. Creation of new campaign level broad match configurations was already blocked on 3 August 2026 across the interface, Google Ads Editor and every API version. Legacy entities disappear from API versions released after 1 September 2026, with older versions keeping them until their own sunsets around September 2027.

When is the Dynamic Search Ads auto migration?

The Developer Blog post of 12 August 2026, which is the newer source, gives 1 to 28 February 2027, preceded by interface banners from September 2026 and a reminder on 15 January 2027. Google Ads Help answer 13389795 still says DSA auto upgrades start in September 2026 alongside ACA and campaign broad match, and appears not to have been updated. Both are first party pages, so plan against February 2027 while expecting September banners.

Do I need to do anything about Enhanced CPC?

No, because Enhanced CPC is not a pending deprecation: it finished in the week of 31 March 2025 for Search and Display and no further stage is scheduled. The thing worth auditing is what happened to campaigns that were never proactively migrated, since they now run effectively as Manual CPC.

Which of these changes apply in Thailand?

All of them except the Merchant Center pickup cost and minimum order value requirement, which applies in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and EEA countries only. The Local Services Ads migration reaches non US accounts in 2027 rather than August 2026, so a Thai account sits in the later wave. For the rest, Google published no regional carve out at all.

Working through a timeline this long inside a live account is mostly sequencing: which change touches which campaign, what has to be exported before a date passes, and what can safely wait until next quarter. If you would rather have that mapped against your own account structure and budget calendar, the Google Ads management team can run it with you.