Google has quietly updated its own Ads Help documentation to acknowledge what advertisers have complained about for years: Performance Max campaigns can end up serving on a brand’s own branded search queries, often at a much higher cost than a plain search ad would have.
Performance Max, or PMax, is Google’s automated campaign type that bids across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps from a single budget, using machine learning to decide where and when ads show. Google has marketed it heavily since launch as a way to reach more inventory with less manual management. The persistent complaint from performance marketers has been that PMax’s automation does not reliably distinguish between genuinely new customer searches and searches for the advertiser’s own brand name, the kind of traffic that would often convert anyway with little or no ad spend involved.
Google finally says it in writing
What changed recently is not the underlying behavior, which agencies have been flagging since PMax rolled out broadly, but Google’s own documentation. Updated help center language now states more directly that Performance Max campaigns may serve on branded or navigational queries unless an advertiser actively works to exclude that traffic, rather than leaving advertisers to infer the behavior from their own campaign data and trial-and-error testing.
For agencies and in-house marketers who have spent years building spreadsheets to prove this exact pattern to skeptical clients and finance teams, Google putting it in writing is a meaningful shift, even if it does not change the underlying mechanics. It turns an argument that used to rely on inferred correlation, a brand campaign’s cost-per-click creeping up right as a PMax campaign launched, into something advertisers can point to directly when asking Google for brand exclusion tools or justifying budget allocation internally.
Why this costs real money
The mechanics of why this matters are straightforward. A branded search, someone typing a company’s name directly into Google, is usually the cheapest, highest-converting traffic an advertiser can buy, precisely because the person searching already knows what they want. When PMax’s automated bidding captures that traffic inside a broader campaign optimized for overall conversions, it can report strong performance numbers while quietly displacing clicks that would have converted anyway through a dedicated, far cheaper branded search campaign, or through an organic listing that costs nothing at all.
Marketers who have tested this by excluding brand terms from PMax, where Google’s tools allow it, frequently report that overall campaign conversion volume holds steady while cost per acquisition drops, which is exactly the signature of a campaign that was paying for traffic it did not need to pay for. The newly updated documentation gives that finding an official source rather than leaving it as an open question every agency has to re-litigate with every new client.
Search marketers have spent the better part of this year building workarounds, from manual brand exclusion lists to separate dedicated brand campaigns run alongside PMax specifically to soak up branded traffic before PMax’s bidding engine has a chance to claim it. Those workarounds remain the most reliable fix available today, since Google has not announced a setting that fully and automatically separates branded from non-branded intent inside a single PMax campaign.
A measurement problem bigger than one campaign type
This fits into a broader pattern of advertisers and publishers needing Google to be more transparent about how its automated systems allocate traffic and attribute value. A similar transparency gap has shaped the debate over AI Overviews, where Teck Hustlers covered a case study on what happens to click-through rates when sites opt out of AI Overviews entirely. In both cases, the core issue is the same: Google’s automated layers increasingly sit between a business and the customer behavior it is trying to measure, and getting a clear read on what is actually working requires either painstaking testing or, as happened here, waiting for Google to update a help document.
The fix available to advertisers right now is incomplete but real. Google does allow brand exclusion lists and negative keyword controls that can reduce, though not entirely eliminate, PMax’s overlap with branded search. Account managers who have not already set these up have a clear, concrete action to take this week rather than simply hoping the campaign’s own optimization settles into a sensible balance on its own.
The bottom line
Performance Max was never going to stop advertisers from questioning where their budget actually goes, but Google acknowledging the brand-search overlap in its own documentation removes a layer of ambiguity that agencies have argued about for years. Any advertiser running PMax without brand exclusions in place is likely paying for clicks that organic search or a cheap branded campaign would have delivered for far less, and that is now something Google itself has put in writing.
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