I manage our own Google Ads account here at ZenithSpark, and the truth is that the platform I’m logging into today barely resembles the one I learned on. Manual bid adjustments, granular keyword-level control, seeing exactly which search term triggered which ad, these used to be the actual job of running paid search. Increasingly, the job is something closer to feeding a system well and trusting its judgement, which is a genuinely different skill, and not one every advertiser has been comfortable adjusting to.
The industry’s own word for it was “black box”
Performance Max, Google’s automated campaign type spanning Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover from a single campaign, has become the dominant way ad spend now flows through the platform. Industry tracking suggests adoption climbed from around 8% of accounts in 2022 to an estimated 82% by 2026 (Tinuiti/Optmyzr data, via Pace, 2026). For most of that growth period, the trade-off advertisers made was blunt, considerably better reach and automation in exchange for genuinely losing visibility into which search terms were triggering their ads, where budget was actually going, and why. “Black box” became the industry’s own shorthand for it, not a critic’s exaggeration.
Despite all that, I’d still caution against trusting it blindly and letting it run on display ads unless you have a large budget and are building brand rather than clicks. The choices of display positions is genuinely baffling, and its use on touchscreen games leads to mostly useless clicks.
Google has been visibly responding to that criticism
What’s changed recently, and what I think is worth any UK advertiser knowing, is that Google has spent the past year building back a meaningful amount of the transparency that PMax originally removed. Full search term reporting, on par with standard Search campaigns, has been rolled out, letting advertisers see the actual queries triggering their ads again. Campaign and account-level negative keywords, something advertisers had been requesting since PMax’s launch, are now supported, alongside channel-level reporting that breaks down performance across Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube individually rather than one blended number (Search Engine Journal, reporting on Google’s 2026 Performance Max updates). None of this restores full manual control, but it’s a genuine and fairly rapid course correction from a platform that had, by its own advertisers’ account, gone too far toward opacity.
What I’ve actually learned running our own account
The instinct I’d push back on, both for our own account and for clients, is treating automation as something to resist or work around. In my experience, Google’s AI genuinely does optimise well within the parameters you give it, but it optimises within those parameters, nothing more. If your conversion tracking is inaccurate, if the audience signals you feed it are weak, or if your creative assets are mediocre, automation doesn’t fix any of that. It amplifies it, often expensively. The advertisers I see getting the best results aren’t the ones fighting the automation or the ones blindly trusting it, they’re the ones treating data quality and creative quality as the actual strategic work now, since that’s the lever they still genuinely control.
Where manual control still earns its keep
I wouldn’t recommend handing everything to automated campaign types, even with the transparency improvements. For high-value, high-intent keywords, particularly in competitive UK markets where cost-per-click has risen sharply, dedicated Search campaigns with proper keyword-level control still tend to earn their place alongside PMax rather than being replaced by it. The pragmatic approach I’ve settled on, and the one I’d generally recommend to a client, is running both in a complementary structure, letting PMax handle reach and discovery across Google’s wider inventory while keeping tighter, manually managed control over the specific, expensive, high-conversion-intent terms that matter most to the business. It’s where you stuff the funnel that is important.
The broader lesson I’d take from the last couple of years, watching this shift up close, is that paid search hasn’t stopped being a discipline worth investing real expertise in. It’s just that the expertise has moved. Less time spent adjusting individual bids, more time spent making sure the signals, creative and tracking feeding the automation are actually good enough to be trusted with the budget.
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