Google is about to remix your video ads with AI. You have until September 4th to say no.
Performance Max is now using generative AI to auto-fill missing aspect ratios in video campaigns. If you only uploaded a 16:9 cut of your ad, Google will invent the 9:16 and 1:1 versions itself and start serving them. It's a genuinely useful feature for advertisers who never had the resources to cut every format by hand, and it's mildly terrifying for anyone who cares about exactly what their brand looks like in the wild. Both of those things are true at once, and which one matters more depends entirely on your account. (New to Google Ads generally? Our beginner's guide covers the basics this assumes.)
What's actually changing
Today, if your PMax campaign only has a 16:9 video and Google needs a vertical placement, that inventory either gets skipped or filled with a fairly basic crop of your existing footage. The new behavior replaces that with generative AI reconstructing the missing formats, extending backgrounds, repositioning elements, generating content to fill space that wasn't in your original footage rather than just cropping what was already there.
The upside is real. Coverage across placements improves without anyone on your team spending a weekend re-cutting video for three aspect ratios. For smaller accounts that were quietly losing inventory because they only ever shipped one format, this closes a real gap.
The downside is also real. You didn't approve the specific frame-by-frame output of what Google generates. If brand consistency matters to you, and for most established brands it genuinely does, an AI-generated vertical crop of your ad is now going out under your name without a human ever looking at it first.
The deadline that makes this worth acting on this week
Opt-out is available through your account team or Google's opt-out form, and the deadline is September 4th. After that, it's on by default for eligible campaigns. That's a hard date just over a week out from when this went live, which is what makes this the kind of story worth acting on now rather than another vague "AI is changing everything" piece to read and forget.
How to decide whether to opt out
This isn't a universal yes-or-no. It depends on what kind of account you're running.
Opt out if brand guidelines are strict. If your organization has a real brand book, approval workflows for creative, or a legal or compliance team that reviews ad content, an AI-generated crop that nobody signed off on is a real risk, not a theoretical one. Keep control here and cut your own formats, even if it costs more time.
Consider leaving it on if you're inventory-constrained. If your actual problem has been limited video coverage because your team never had bandwidth to produce every aspect ratio, this feature solves a real gap. Weigh the upside of broader placement coverage against the downside of losing some control over the exact output.
Test it on a low-stakes campaign first either way. Before deciding at the account level, let it run on one campaign that isn't your flagship brand push, and actually look at what gets generated. A five-minute review of the output tells you more about whether this is right for your brand than a policy decision made in the abstract.
Nice in theory, mildly terrifying if you care about brand consistency, and that tension is exactly the calculation you need to make before September 4th. Whichever way you land, the mistake here is doing nothing and letting the default decide for you. Check your account, look at what auto-generation actually produces, and make the call deliberately rather than by inaction.
If you'd rather hand that decision to someone who lives in PMax accounts daily, it's the kind of call our PPC agency makes every week for clients in London, Bradford, and beyond.
Written by Akram
Technical Specialist