Google is quietly letting exact and phrase match keywords in standard Search campaigns serve ads inside A.I. Mode, its conversational search surface, according to a Sept. 4 confirmation from Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin. The change, however small in Google’s telling, punctures one of the last walls advertisers had built around where their money actually goes.

“This is a small experiment that recently kicked off,” Marvin told Search Engine Roundtable, whose executive editor Barry Schwartz published the exchange at 2:50 p.m. that afternoon. In a longer statement, Marvin drew the perimeter: “Exact and phrase match keywords are eligible to serve text ads in AI Mode. Note however that this is limited to cases where there is explicit and direct user intent. AI Max and PMax for Search are designed to capture complex conversational intent and access our latest ad formats (like Highlighted Answers).”

The experiment was first flagged by Anthony Higman, founder and chief executive of ADSQUIRE, who wrote on LinkedIn that Google was “serving regular pure search campaigns with restrictive match types in AI mode” and said he’d verified it across multiple accounts. Higman argued on X that Marvin’s wording understated the shift. Schwartz read it as a narrow pilot. Marvin’s statement is the only on-record Google position.

The scale is what makes the pilot’s framing awkward. Google told I/O 2026 that A.I. Mode had passed one billion monthly users. Similarweb data cited by PPC Land put ads on nearly 30 percent of ad-eligible A.I. Mode queries. An SE Ranking study reported by Search Engine Land found ads on close to one in three commercial queries by mid-2026, with 71.1 percent of those ad-triggering queries showing two advertisers in the same response.

Until now, PPC Land notes, reaching those placements required one of three automation-dependent routes: A.I. Max for Search, Performance Max, or broad match paired with Smart Bidding. Exact and phrase match were the escape hatch, the way small operators kept spend legible to themselves. That hatch is narrower now, and Google hasn’t defined “explicit and direct user intent,” disclosed a country, vertical, account share, or end date, or added an A.I. Mode column to keyword-row reporting.

It also arrives a week after Google forced every Search campaign with broad match or auto-created assets into a migration on Sept. 1. Two moves in seven days, in opposite directions, toward the same destination.

Sources