What Is the Google Ads AI Brief?

Everything in this section is Google's description, not ours. Google says the AI Brief uses Gemini and gives you "a new way to use your own words to steer AI Max." You tell it about your business, what your ads should say, and who you want to reach.

That matters because AI Max writes ad text for you and matches your ads to searches you never typed in as keywords. Before the brief, text guidelines only let you tell it what not to say. The AI Brief lets you tell it what to do too.

Google splits the brief into three parts, each with an example line from Google.

Not everywhere yet. Google is rolling it out in steps. Here is what Google has said so far, in date order.

The AI Brief steers AI Max, so you need AI Max on that Search campaign first. That is the part to think about, because AI Max is not one switch.

Google's help page says turning on AI Max turns on search term matching, which reaches past your keywords. It also turns on text customization, where Google writes ad text from your ads, your site and your assets. And it turns on final URL expansion, where Google can send a click to a different page on your site than the one you picked.

For a store, that last one is the risky one. A shopper who searched for one product can land on another. Google lets you turn final URL expansion and text customization off in campaign settings, and search term matching off in ad group settings. So you can try AI Max, and the brief, without handing over every lever at once.

Text guidelines came first, and the AI Brief takes them in. Here is how the two compare, side by side.

This brief is made up, for a store that sells dog beds. It shows the kind of lines that help a store. Write yours about your own products and your own shoppers.

Tell it the facts it cannot guess (shipping, what you do not sell). Keep it away from searches that never buy. Point each type of shopper at the product that fits them.

The biggest fear with AI Max is "Google writes my ads and I cannot steer it." A brief in plain words is a real answer to that. Being able to say "never mention prices" cuts the risk of ads that show last month's sale.

Audience lines are the second win. One campaign can show a different message to two kinds of shopper, like the older-dog owner and the new puppy owner in the sample above, without you splitting it into two campaigns.

The catch: Google's own Think page says the AI still bends the message a bit. My read is that matching works the same way. So keep your negative keyword list, read every sample ad, and check your search terms after a week. The test steps on this page are my call, from running 400+ store accounts at ZenoX Media, my Google Ads agency.

Writing the brief is free. The hard part is the checking afterwards, week after week.

Scaley Media Buyer ($99/mo + 1% of total ad spend) is the one we build, so weigh that. It connects to Google Ads read-only. You ask "which searches did this campaign pay for this week, and which ones sold?" and it reads your live account and answers right away, with the numbers. Your dashboard also shows how much wasted spend Scaley found this week. It never changes a setting and never runs on its own.

Scaley comes in two other levels. Scaley Consultant ($99/mo flat) reads screenshots or CSVs you upload and connects to nothing. Scaley Suite ($199/mo + 4% of total ad spend) finds the fixes, like a negative keyword AI Max needs, and makes each change only after you say yes to that one change. Every level starts the same way: 3-day free trial. Card required. Cancel anytime.

If you want a person to run the whole account, that is what an agency does. ZenoX Media is mine, so I am not neutral there either.