If you run Google Ads for a trade or home improvement business, two things happened this month that will affect what you pay for a lead. One started today. The other lands on 1st September.
Neither will be emailed to you. Neither shows up as a warning in your account. If nobody looks, the first sign will be a cost per lead that has quietly crept up and nobody can explain why.
Here’s what changed, in plain English, and what’s worth doing about it.
1. From today (17th August 2026) Google can spend more per lead than it has been
This is the one that matters most.
If you’re running Target CPA or Target ROAS bidding, you typed a number into a box at some point. Maybe you said you’d pay £50 for a lead. And for months, Google has been quietly getting them for £35, because your budget was capped and it couldn’t spend any more.
That gap is closing.
From today, campaigns that are limited by budget and beating their target will start drifting up towards the number you actually typed in. Your £35 lead doesn’t stay at £35. It heads for £50, because that’s what you told Google you were willing to pay.
Google has confirmed targets set at ad group level are in scope too, and lead gen accounts are full of those. The rollout is gradual over several weeks rather than a switch flipped this morning, so there’s a bit of time.
What to do this week:
Pull up every campaign that has shown “Limited by budget” in the last twelve months. Put your actual cost per lead next to your target. Where there’s a gap because nobody has revisited that target since it was set, lower it to match what you’re really achieving.
Campaigns that aren’t budget-limited need nothing at all.
Reported by PPC Land, 13 August.
2. On 1st September, your exact match keywords stop being exactly exact
If you’ve ever put square brackets around a keyword to keep a plumber’s budget on “emergency plumber Sheffield” rather than the word “plumbing”, that control has been loosening for a while.
Analysis of 383 million impressions by Mike Ryan at Smarter Ecommerce, written up by PPC Land, found that in campaigns running AI Max, roughly one in four impressions credited to an exact match keyword wasn’t exact at all. It came through AI Max search term matching, which Ryan describes plainly as “basically broad match”.
Exact match sat near 100% through early 2025. By July 2026 it had slid to around 71%, with two thirds of that drop happening in the last four months.
Two honest caveats before anyone panics. That sample is EMEA ecommerce, not UK trades lead generation. And it only covers accounts that switched AI Max on voluntarily. So it isn’t a direct read on what will happen in a landscaper’s account in Doncaster.
The reason it still matters is the date. From 1 September, campaigns running campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets get upgraded to AI Max automatically. It stops being an early adopter problem and becomes the default.
What to do this week:
Go through your search campaigns and check which have automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match switched on. Decide whether you want that traffic before Google decides for you.
Then get into the habit of reading your search terms report. Not once a quarter. Weekly.
Reported by PPC Land, 9 and 13 August.
3. If someone from Google rings offering a free account review, it’s a sales call
This comes up constantly and almost nobody sees it for what it is.
PPC managers reported again this month that Google representatives are going directly to business owners, past the person managing the account, offering a friendly free review. The usual outcome is broad match switched on, automation loosened off and the budget nudged up.
It isn’t a favour. It’s a sales call from a company whose revenue goes up when your spend does.
What to do:
If someone else manages your ads, agree now that nothing changes in the account unless it comes through them. If you manage your own, just know what the call is before you take it.
While you’re in there, check who else has standing access to your ad account. You’d be surprised who’s still on the list from three years ago.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable, 11 August.
4. Your ad account now has an opinion. Don’t let it set your budget.
Google has rebuilt the Google Ads and Analytics homepages around AI generated summaries, insight cards and a prompt box you can type a plain question into. You can build a dashboard by asking for one.
For reporting on a small account, that’s genuinely useful. It’ll tell you what changed last month in seconds.
Here’s the catch, and it’s a real one. The announcement carries no accuracy figures, no source citations and no way to trace a generated insight back to the report it came from. Google gave no country scope either, though every earlier release in this line went to English language accounts globally, so UK accounts are very likely included.
Use it to save an hour on reporting. Never change a budget on the strength of it without opening the actual report.
And remember what it can’t tell you. An AI summary will happily report 42 leads. It has no idea how many answered the phone, booked a survey, or turned into a job in the diary. That number lives in your quote book, not in Ads Manager.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable, 11 August, and PPC Land, 16 August.
5. Three smaller ones worth knowing
The language setting is disappearing in September. Google is removing campaign level language targeting from Search campaigns and from the Search Network part of Performance Max. Its own systems will pick the ad language at auction based on your ads and landing page. For a UK account running everything in English, this genuinely changes nothing. One fewer dial to get wrong.
AI labels have reached ads in the local pack. If you use Google’s own generative tools to build or edit an ad, a disclosure is added automatically. If you use AI outside Google, you’re expected to declare it yourself, which is an honour system. Visible badges on the ad face are limited to the EU, India and New York for now, so UK searchers won’t see one yet. The declaration rule still applies to UK accounts, so get into the habit.
Local Services Ads are moving into Performance Max, in America. It’s a US home services rollout covering plumbing, electrical, roofing and HVAC. It is not live in the UK. Worth knowing it’s coming, nothing to do about it until it gets here.
What this adds up to
Two changes in three weeks, both moving in the same direction: Google taking decisions away from the advertiser and making them itself.
That isn’t automatically bad. Less to get wrong is a fair trade for a lot of small accounts. But it does mean the account needs looking at more often, not less, because things that used to sit still now move on their own.
If you’re spending £1,000 or more a month and you couldn’t confidently say what your cost per lead was last month, or whether your targets have been reviewed since they were set, this is the month to check.
Not sure whether any of this applies to your account?
Book a free 15-minute call, and I’ll tell you straight whether there’s anything worth changing or if you can leave it alone.