Google is ending support for creating new Smart Campaigns via its Ads API, pushing advertisers toward Performance Max. It trades a small simple black box for a large opaque one. Here is how to migrate without losing visibility.
Google is not removing automation. It is consolidating it, and pointing everyone at Performance Max.
Google is ending support for creating new Smart Campaigns through its Ads API. Existing Smart Campaigns keep running, but you will no longer be able to spin up new ones programmatically. The path Google wants you on instead is Performance Max.
Smart Campaigns were the entry-level automated product, built for small businesses who wanted to advertise without managing keywords. Performance Max is the bigger, broader automation engine that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps in one campaign. Google is quietly funnelling advertisers from the simple black box into the bigger one.
For agencies and tools that build on the Ads API, this is a migration job. For the businesses underneath them, it is a shift in how much they can see.
Why it matters
Smart Campaigns were limited but legible. Performance Max is more powerful and far less transparent, reporting results in aggregate you cannot easily pull apart. Moving from one to the other means trading a small simple box for a large opaque one, and many Australian small businesses will not notice the difference until they try to work out what their spend actually did.
Performance Max runs across five Google surfaces at once: Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps, all reported as one blended result.
This is the structural story of 2026 in one change. More automation, less granularity, more spend flowing into channels you cannot inspect.
What to do about it
Automation is not the problem. Losing the ability to check its work is. Migrate with your instruments still attached.