If you run Shopify search campaigns, Dynamic Search Ads have probably been quietly doing a lot of work for you: catching long-tail queries, filling gaps in keyword coverage, and picking up demand you never explicitly bid on. That mechanism is being absorbed into AI Max, and the controls you use to manage it are changing shape.
The short version: the targeting logic does not disappear, but it stops being a separate ad type you can isolate and report on. Instead it becomes a setting inside a broader campaign that also expands your keywords, rewrites your headlines, and chooses landing pages. If you migrate without adjusting your account structure first, you lose the ability to tell which of those things is helping.
What actually changes
Three mechanics move at once, which is why the transition feels bigger than a settings change.
- Targeting expansion replaces the DSA crawl. Instead of matching queries against your indexed pages only, the system matches intent across your whole site and adjacent phrasing.
- Text asset generation becomes default-on. Headlines and descriptions can be written from landing page content unless you opt out.
- Final URL expansion chooses the destination page. Useful on deep catalogues, risky on thin or seasonal collections.
Audit which pages you are willing to let the system send traffic to. Exclude out-of-stock collections, gated pages, and anything with placeholder copy. This single step prevents most of the wasted spend we see in early AI Max accounts.
Where performance usually moves
Across the accounts we migrated in the first quarter, the pattern was consistent: impression volume rose quickly, click quality lagged for two to three weeks, and blended ROAS recovered once exclusions were tightened. The early volume is not the win. The win is what remains after you prune.
Treat the first month as a data-collection exercise rather than a performance test. Budget for it, and tell your stakeholders the number they should be watching is search term quality, not cost per click.
The accounts that struggled were not the ones that migrated early. They were the ones that migrated without a URL exclusion list. Author Name, Head of Paid Media
A migration order that works
1. Separate brand from non-brand first
If brand terms sit in the same campaign, expansion will happily spend your budget on queries you would win anyway. Split them before you enable anything.
2. Turn expansion on, generation off
Change one variable at a time. Let targeting expansion run against your existing, human-written assets so you can attribute the lift correctly.
3. Add generation on your best performer only
Once the targeting change has settled, enable asset generation in a single campaign and compare against a held-back control.
What to report on
The reporting surface is thinner than DSA reporting was, so decide what you will hold the campaign to before you launch. In most ecommerce accounts, three views are enough: search term category mix, landing page revenue, and new-customer share. If a change cannot be seen in one of those, it is not worth arguing about.
Keep a written record of every setting change and its date. When the reporting is coarse, your change log becomes the attribution model.