AI Max search terms: finding the ones that waste money

What changes when AI Max is on

Your ads start showing on searches you never added as keywords. Google marks them in the search terms report with an extra match type, "AI Max" (Google Ads Help).

The list grows fast: one advertiser on r/PPC counted 955 queries in a week with AI Max on, against 30 after turning it off. Adalysis reviewed about 30,000 AI Max search terms and found that 99% of their impressions had zero conversions (Adalysis).

How to check it by hand

1. Open Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms.
2. Set the date range to the last 30 days and filter the match type to AI Max.
3. Sort by cost, highest first, and look for terms with clicks and 0 conversions.
4. For each one, decide: do you sell that? If not, add it as a negative keyword.

It works, but it is slow on one account and painful on ten, and AI Max keeps adding new terms every day.

How to do it with Claude

Ads MCP connects Claude to your Google Ads account in read-only mode. Ask:

Find the search terms that spent money in the last 30 days without converting.

Claude lists every search term that spent more than your average cost per conversion and brought none, including the ones AI Max matched, with the money each one cost. You tell it which ones you actually sell, and it gives you a negative keywords file to import in Google Ads Editor. Nothing in your account changes until you import it.

To catch new AI Max terms as they appear, ask for the daily watchdog script: it runs inside your own Google Ads account and emails you the searches that start wasting money. The free plan includes 50 tool calls a month.