Google's AI Max Exclusions Are Going Account-Wide and Repricing the Setup Hour

Google Ads is rolling out account-level exclusions for AI Max content and titles, surfacing through Search Engine Roundtable on May 7, 2026. The change moves term exclusions and messaging restrictions, currently capped at 25 terms and 40 restrictions per campaign, to inherit from the account. For agencies that built billable workflows around per-campaign suppression, the setup hour just got a lot smaller.

What's actually moving up a level

AI Max for Search has two creative-control levers, both campaign-scoped today. Term exclusions accept up to 25 exact words or phrases the AI cannot use in headlines or descriptions. Messaging restrictions accept up to 40 freeform instructions like "don't generate assets with prices" or "don't imply our products are cheap." Google globalized the text guidelines beta on February 26, 2026, removing language and vertical gaps, but kept the configuration unit at the campaign level. PPC Land's coverage of the global rollout made the per-campaign limits explicit.

The Search Engine Roundtable headline confirms what advertisers have been pushing for since the global rollout. Those exclusion lists are about to inherit from the account, the same way placement exclusions started doing on January 14, 2026. Google has not published the account-level cap yet, which is the number the next planning cycle will hinge on.

Per-campaign suppression was already a workflow. That's why the move is overdue.

I think the change quietly admits something Google has been careful not to say out loud. Term exclusions and messaging restrictions are meta-rules. They describe what your brand never says, regardless of which campaign happens to be running. Putting them at the campaign level meant every new AI Max campaign needed the same 25 terms typed in again, and every quarterly audit checked the same 40 restrictions in 12 places. That's the kind of repetition that quietly fills agency status reports.

One paid search lead on r/PPC posted in March about maintaining a Google Sheet of brand guideline terms specifically because new AI Max campaigns kept getting stood up without them. From what I've seen in agency Slack channels, that shadow sheet is the most common artifact in any AI Max account running more than five campaigns. The account-level layer is basically Google catching up to where serious agencies already were.

The 25-minute math, and what comes out of the SOW

Let's do the boring math. If your team manages 12 active AI Max campaigns and adds 25 term exclusions and 40 messaging restrictions per campaign at setup, that's roughly 25 to 30 minutes of typing per campaign, or about 5 hours total at the account. When the account-level layer ships, that 5 hours collapses to one. The other four stop being billable.

Compress that across an agency book of 40 accounts and the change pulls about 160 hours out of the quarterly setup line. Some agencies will repackage the time into strategy work. Most will just stop charging for it, which seems likely to mean the AI Max launch SKU loses a chunk of revenue in the next pricing cycle. That's not catastrophic on its own, but it's the third compression in six months. The first was Meta moving the agency-hour billing unit, and the second was Google's automatic DSA upgrade to AI Max in September, which removes another setup ritual from the calendar.

What text guidelines actually constrain (and what they don't)

Worth being clear-eyed about what these levers can and can't do. Term exclusions are language-specific. If you exclude "cheap" in English, the French and German equivalents still ship, which PPC Land flagged at the global rollout. Multilingual accounts have to repeat each list per language anyway, which means the account-level promotion does not fix the multilingual mess. It just centralizes the inputs.

Messaging restrictions are the more powerful lever, but they're written in natural language and the AI interprets them at generation time. A restriction like "don't include prices" gets honored. "Don't sound desperate" mostly doesn't. Restrictions that name a thing the model can detect (currency symbols, named competitor brands, specific regulated phrases) seem to work. Restrictions that describe vibes don't. Anyway, this is a known limitation that won't disappear just because the lists move up to the account.

The follow-on question agencies should be asking

If exclusions are moving to the account, the next obvious move is to make brand inclusions account-wide too. Today brand inclusions are campaign- or ad-group-level, per the Google Ads API documentation, and that's the lever most agencies use to keep AI Max from serving on competitor queries during a fragile launch. Account-level brand controls would be a bigger shift than account-level exclusions, because brand inclusion lists tend to be stable across the entire portfolio anyway.

Brand inclusions are still campaign- or ad-group-only as of this week. If the exclusion change ships cleanly and Google decides agencies handle account-level brand lists responsibly, brand inclusions are likely the next domino. I would not restructure your campaign mappings for it yet, but it seems worth building the master brand list now and keeping it deduped against the eventual cap.

Three things to do this week before the rollout closes

A few specific things worth handling now, while the account-level flag is still being staged.

First, dump every per-campaign term exclusion list into a single deduplicated sheet. The 25-term cap is per-campaign today, which means 12 campaigns can hold 300 unique terms across them. The account-level layer will still cap somewhere (Google has not published the number yet), and you'll want the prioritized list ready before the limit gets announced. Order it by recurrence. Terms that show up in 8 of 12 campaigns are obviously the ones to keep.

Second, categorize your messaging restrictions by reason. "Regulatory" (HIPAA, financial disclosures, geo-specific compliance text). "Brand voice" (tone, prohibited phrases). "Competitive" (named competitors, competitive comparisons). When account-level lands, only the regulatory and competitive restrictions should default. Brand voice is the most campaign-specific lever, and you'll want to keep at least some of it scoped that way.

Third, audit which campaigns currently have no exclusions configured. A surprising number of agency-managed accounts have AI Max campaigns running with the default empty list, especially DSAs that have been auto-upgraded ahead of Google's September DSA cutover. When the account-level list inherits, those campaigns suddenly get rules they have been ignoring. That's where the surprise creative drops happen, and it's the single most common reason an account loses a week of impression share after a feature flip.

The setup hour wasn't billable forever

Final reflection: the per-campaign setup hour existed because Google's tooling required it. Now the tooling doesn't, so the line item shrinks. Agency pricing that bundles AI Max launches as a flat fee will absorb this fine. Pricing that itemizes the setup line is about to have a quarterly conversation with the client.

The interesting question isn't whether agencies survive a smaller setup line. It's whether they remember to rebuild the parts of AI Max management that still actually need a human. Negative keyword discipline. Brand inclusion list curation. Messaging restrictions that have to get rewritten after the model proves it doesn't honor anything resembling vibes. Account-level exclusions don't touch any of that, which is probably the most useful thing about them.

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