Kondiment

Last Thursday, the Kondiment team was at IQ Digital Summit Bucharest, a full day of conversations about AI and what it means for the way we work.

We heard from Riaz Shah, Mo Gawdat, Radu Georgescu and many others. And a special moment for us: our founder, Lucian Despoiu, took the stage to share what he has learned from expanding into Southeast Asia.

We left with plenty of ideas to test in our own work and with our clients. Thank you to the organizers for a great day.

Upgrade 100

If you run Google Ads, some of your Search campaigns may have changed in September without you noticing 👀

Between 1 and 30 September, Google automatically upgraded Search campaigns that used campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets to AI Max. Names and IDs stayed the same, so your campaign list looks exactly like it did before.

What changed depends on what you had switched on. If you used campaign-level broad match, your ads can now show on queries that none of your keywords cover. If you used automatically created assets, you also have text customization, which means Google can write headlines and descriptions from your landing pages and existing ads. Final URL expansion stayed off by default, but check that nobody turned it on.

Here's what we'd look at in your account this month: 🔍

1️⃣ Search terms report: add the Source column. You'll see how much of your spend now comes from AI Max matches, and what those searches actually are.

2️⃣ Assets report: find the text marked "Google AI" and read it the way your legal or brand team would.

3️⃣ Landing pages report, if final URL expansion is on: the "Selected by" column shows which pages Google picked. Your careers page, old blog posts and out-of-stock products shouldn't be getting paid clicks.

⚠️ One reporting trap: the standard search terms view and the AI Max view overlap. If you add them together, you'll count more clicks than you actually got.

📅 Dynamic Search Ads campaigns get the same automatic upgrade in February 2027. If you run DSA, you still have time to upgrade on your own terms instead of taking Google's defaults.

AI Max can find profitable searches your keyword list would miss. It can also spend on searches you'd never have chosen. Before Black Friday budgets start running through these campaigns, you'll want to know which of the two is happening in your account.