AI news · Google AI Max · Skai Q3 report
AI Max takes 16% of Google spend, Skai data shows
Google’s AI-led search campaigns more than doubled their share of spend on Skai’s platform this year, helped by automatic upgrades.
AI Max, the Google Ads setting that lets Google’s AI pick extra search queries, rewrite ad text and choose the landing page, took 16 per cent of Google spend in September on Skai’s platform, up from 7 per cent in January. Skai, a marketing software company, published the figures on 27 October 2026 in its third-quarter trends report. Accounts using AI Max rose from 38 to 66 per cent over the same months. The data covers about $10 billion of ad spend run through Skai over five quarters.
Skai credits part of the rise to automatic upgrades. Google announced in April that older automation would move into AI Max, then pushed the switch for Dynamic Search Ads back to February 2027; campaigns using automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match were still due to move across from September 2026, Google’s post says.
Elsewhere in the report, a click bought through Amazon DSP, Amazon’s tool for buying display and video ads, now costs $0.99 on average, 44 per cent less than before, while spend through it rose 34 per cent from a year earlier; TikTok’s slice of social-media ad spend grew from 13 per cent to a fifth.
Google publishes no share of its ads made with AI. Our census of published figures, checked on 30 October, finds the same silence at Meta, TikTok and Amazon, so outside counts such as Skai’s fill the gap.
Skai names automatic upgrades as one cause of the rise, and Google’s schedule moved campaigns with automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match into AI Max from September, so some of that 66 per cent of accounts may run AI Max without anyone at the advertiser having turned it on.
Sources
Alexandre S.
Alexandre S. is a creative ad strategist and copywriter with ten years' experience in digital marketing across multiple channels.
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