Google moved the Dynamic Search Ads sunset to February 2027, and if your negative-keyword plan was built around the old September 2026 auto-upgrade, that plan is now running on a stale date. The pressure eased but did not vanish: you have a defined window instead of a cliff. The point of this post is to use that window deliberately — to re-sequence your DSA and AI Max negative cleanup so you do the work once, on your schedule, rather than twice: once in a panic before a deadline that moved, and again after an automigration you did not supervise.
The confirmed timeline, worth pinning down because so much guidance still cites the old dates: Google restored the ability to create new DSA campaigns on 15 June 2026, a voluntary migration window runs through to January 2027, the ability to create new DSAs is then removed in January 2027, and automatic migration of any remaining DSA campaigns to AI Max for Search or Performance Max begins in February 2027. That is the clock your negative-keyword cadence should run against — not the September date many checklists, including older ones, were written for.
Why the delay changes your cadence, not your plan
The delay does not change what you need to do — reconcile your negative list to whatever campaign type replaces DSA — it changes when, and the when is the whole problem. Under the old September framing, the honest advice was to rush: get the successor campaign's negatives roughed in before a forced upgrade you could not control. With February 2027 automigration and voluntary creation open until January 2027, that urgency is gone, and the risk flips from “not enough time” to “too much time,” because a long runway is exactly how a migration task gets forgotten until the automigration does it for you.
So the re-timing is specific: keep your DSA campaigns and their negatives running as live work through the voluntary window, and in parallel — not later — prepare the negative list the successor campaign will need. The mistake the extended timeline invites is treating February 2027 as “far away” and deferring the cleanup, when the cleanup is the part that takes real calendar time: building, testing, and reconciling a negative list against a new matching surface is not a one-afternoon job. The delay bought you room to do it properly, which is only an advantage if you spend the room rather than bank it.
What actually changes when DSA becomes AI Max
The reason a DSA negative list does not simply carry over is that the two campaign types match queries in different ways. Dynamic Search Ads match queries to your pages using your site's content, so a DSA negative list tends to be built around page themes and category terms — the words that generated junk when Google crawled your catalogue and matched loosely to it. AI Max for Search layers broad, keywordless query expansion on top of keyword matching, which drags in semantically related queries a page-based list was never written to catch. The old negatives still apply, but they were scoped to a different kind of traffic.
That means the migration is a coverage problem, not a copy-paste. After the upgrade you typically need additional negatives aimed at the new expansion, and you need to recheck existing negatives for conflicts against the keywords the upgraded campaign now carries — a broad-match negative that was harmless against DSA page-matching can start blocking a keyword the AI Max campaign depends on. This is the reconciliation the AI Max forced-upgrade negative-list reconciliation workflow walks through in detail; the DSA delay simply gives you the time to run it before the upgrade rather than after. Treat the successor as a new serving surface that inherits your negatives but not your coverage.
The sequence to run between now and 2027
Put the work in an order that leaves the account clean at every step rather than clean only at the end. First, leave your DSA negatives in force while DSA runs — they are still filtering real queries, and removing them early just reopens waste you already closed. Second, in parallel, stand up the successor campaign's negative list as a prepared artefact: mine your current DSA search terms report for the patterns that will survive the move, and add the broader expansion negatives AI Max will need. Third, when you choose to migrate — voluntarily before January 2027, which is the version you control — apply the prepared list and watch the search terms report closely for the first weeks, because the new expansion shows its waste quickly.
If you let automigration handle the move in February 2027 instead, the same prepared list is what saves you: the campaign flips, query expansion starts, and your reconciled negatives are already in place rather than being rebuilt while spend leaks. Either path works; both depend on having done the list work in advance. For the mechanics of auditing the post-migration account, the post-AI Max migration negative-keyword audit is the step-by-step, and the AI Max migration search-terms checklist is the pre-flight list to run before you pull the trigger. The one thing the extended deadline should not buy is complacency — the date moved, the work did not.
Related reading
For reconciling your list against the upgraded campaign, see the AI Max forced-upgrade negative-list reconciliation. For the pre-migration checklist, see the AI Max migration search-terms checklist, and for the audit to run once the dust settles, see the post-AI Max migration negative-keyword audit.