A look at Performance Max, Google's black box ad product for all its owned media that can't break down by price, ad format, media channel, or creative elements
James Hercher / AdExchanger : Tweets: @myles_younger and @percival Tweets: Myles Younger / @myles_younger : You want to know what the #ChatGPT version of a DSP is? it's Google Performance Max. If you are not looking to perfect the “art” of advertising & are simply trying to engineer outcomes, an #AI will (eventually) do it best. By @JamesHercher https://www.adexchanger.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Sean Percival / @percival : Basically if your ad platform uses emojis like ✨ or words like ‘advantage’ and ‘max’ in the UI you are losing control of your media spend. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Performance Max is the end point of a decade-long automation push at Google Ads: machine learning entered the product line with Responsive search ads and Smart shopping in 2018 (Responsive search ads and Smart shopping campaigns), then Google formalized the all-inventory format with automated Performance Max campaigns alongside its Insights page in October 2020 (automated Performance Max campaigns). What AdExchanger documents now is the trade-off baked into that arc: one campaign type across all of Google's owned media, with no reporting by price, ad format, media channel, or creative element.
The format is also becoming the industry template rather than a Google quirk. Google layered a generative AI beta onto Performance Max in late 2023, and TikTok answered with Smart+, explicitly positioned against Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+. Meanwhile the Correspondent's skeptics had already flagged the underlying measurement problem: benchmarks that can't separate ad-driven buyers from people who would have bought anyway.
First-order effects
- Advertisers buying through Performance Max give up channel-, format-, and creative-level reporting across Google's entire owned inventory, leaving bid and target inputs as their only real controls.
- As Myles Younger frames it, the product functions as a ChatGPT-style DSP substitute: advertisers who want to engineer outcomes rather than perfect ad craft route spend straight to Google's optimizer instead of managing placements themselves.
Second-order effects
- Rivals have been forced to clone the structure — TikTok's Smart+ automates creative, targeting, and optimization head-to-head against Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+, making opaque full-funnel automation the default competitive offering.
- Agencies and consultants lose the diagnostic levers they used to justify fees, shifting their value toward feed quality, asset inputs, and incrementality testing done outside the platform.
Third-order effects
- If the Correspondent's critique holds — that ad benchmarks overcount buyers who were converting anyway — black-box products remove the last granular data marketers could use to audit incrementality, leaving platforms as both the seller and the referee of their own performance claims.
- The pattern points toward ad buying consolidating around a few platform-controlled 'Max'-style formats, where competition happens between ecosystems (Google, Meta, TikTok) rather than within them, and Sean Percival's warning about losing control of media spend becomes the structural condition rather than the exception.
The trend: Automated, non-transparent 'Max'-style campaign products are spreading across every major ad platform, trading advertiser visibility into where money goes for algorithmic outcome optimization.