What Google's AI Max Is Doing to Your Leasing Budget
Google's AI Max rolled out as the default way Search campaigns handle matching and creative, and PPC Hero's new framework is basically a field guide for not getting fleeced by it. The short version: AI Max leans hard into broad match and automated asset generation, which means it will happily spend your budget on searches that sound related to "apartments near me" but aren't. For a leasing team, that's not an abstract efficiency debate. That's cost per lead creeping up while your vendor's dashboard still says "optimized."
Apartment search terms are already messy. People search by cross street, by school district, by "pet friendly 2 bed under 1800," and AI Max's broad match expansion will chase all of it, including searches for your competitor down the street or for apartments in a city you don't operate in. Without tight negative keyword lists and real human review, you're paying Google to explore, and you're the one footing the tuition.
The PPC Hero piece lays out a 6-step framework for training and scaling these campaigns instead of just flipping them on and hoping. That's the bar your vendor should be clearing. If they're running AI Max on your leasing campaigns and can't tell you how it's configured, you're not running automated search. You're running a slot machine with your renewal budget.
A good vendor conversation here isn't about trust, it's about specifics. Make them show the settings, not the sentiment.
- 01Are we running AI Max on our Search campaigns right now, and since what date?
- 02What's our negative keyword list look like, and how often is it being updated as broad match expands?
- 03Can you pull cost per lead for the 30 days before AI Max and the 30 days after, broken out by property?
- 04What percentage of our AI Max traffic is coming from search terms outside our target markets or unit types?
- 05Are we using Google's automated assets and creative generation, or are our ads still human-written and property-specific?
- 06What's the process for pausing or rolling back AI Max on a specific campaign if cost per lead spikes?
Source: PPC Hero, October 20, 2026
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