On August 14, Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Product Liaison, announced on LinkedIn that the campaign-level language targeting setting is being removed from Search and Performance Max campaigns, effective September 2026. If you have ever gone into campaign settings and picked which languages your Search campaign should target, that control is going away. Google's automated systems take over the job instead.
What Google actually announced
For Search campaigns and AI Max for Search, the language targeting setting disappears entirely. Google's own developer blog confirms the mechanics: ads will match based on the language of the ad creative, the search term, and the user's language settings and preferences, with no manual override left in the interface. For Performance Max, the change is narrower. Language settings stop applying to the Google Search portion of a Performance Max campaign, but keep working for YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. Shopping ads inside Performance Max were never affected by language settings and still aren't.
That Performance Max detail matters more than it looks. Google's own help documentation said in August 2025 that this removal would apply to Search campaigns only and that non-Search campaign types would be unaffected. As PPC Land reported, that line has now been quietly reversed. Performance Max is explicitly in scope, roughly nine months after the original end-of-2025 deadline passed without the change actually shipping.
Why Google says this barely matters
Marvin's own framing, quoted by PPC Land, was direct: "I know it sounds like a big shift, but it really isn't." Her reasoning is that the manual setting had become redundant because Google's systems already look at ad language, landing page language, search term language and a user's language history to decide who sees what. She also pointed to a practical reason for pulling it: "we heard a lot of confusion about how the manual setting works which has led to set up issues." The most common one, confirmed in the same post, is advertisers assuming that leaving a language unselected excluded it. It never did.
There is also a second change bundled into this one that gets less attention. Once the campaign setting is gone, Google will start prioritising the ad and landing page that match the language of the search query itself, rather than just an inferred preference for the user. Search Engine Land gives the plain example: someone whose browser is set to Spanish but who often searches in English could now be served either language, with the query itself carrying more weight than before.
What stays the same
A few things Google was explicit about not changing. Ad creative is not being translated for you; if you run English ads, they stay in English. Reporting structure is unaffected. Cross-language matching still works the way it always has, meaning your ad can serve against a query in a different language if Google judges the user capable of understanding it. And if you run separate single-language campaigns, for example one English campaign and one Spanish campaign, both continue operating as they do today.
The part worth your attention
None of this is a reason to panic, but it is a reason to look at two things this month rather than assume "no action required" means no action at all.
First, ad and landing page language consistency now carries more weight, not less. With the manual toggle gone, the language of your creative and destination page becomes one of the strongest signals left for who sees your ad. If you run any market where your ad copy and your landing page are in different languages, or where you have historically leaned on the language setting to patch over that mismatch, this is the month to fix the mismatch directly rather than the setting.
Second, if you run parallel campaigns by language in the same market, watch how traffic splits after the change lands. The new prioritisation logic means a clearly-worded Spanish query should now more reliably pull your Spanish creative over your English creative, even for bilingual users. That can shift volume between campaigns that were previously splitting traffic differently. Reallocating budget based on a week of instinct is premature. Reallocating based on two or three weeks of post-change data is reasonable.
If your account is managed through the Google Ads API, either directly or through an agency's tooling, there is a third item. Google's developer blog tells developers to stop including language criteria when creating or updating Search campaigns. Existing criteria can stay where they are. Google describes removing them as optional tidying, "not strictly required as they will not apply." Performance Max tooling is the exception worth noting, because language still governs its non-Search channels.
One more thing worth flagging before you draw conclusions from September's numbers. This change lands in the same month as the automatic upgrade of campaign-level broad match and automatically created assets to AI Max, which we covered separately. Two structural changes hitting Search in the same four-week window means any swing in impressions, CPC or conversion rate this month has at least two plausible causes inside the platform. Don't let a single change take the blame, or the credit, for a shift that might be coming from somewhere else entirely.
The honest summary
Google is right that most accounts will not need to rebuild anything. The setting was already doing less than most advertisers assumed, and single-language campaign structures keep functioning normally. But "no action required" is a statement about the interface, not about your results. The advertisers who come out ahead here are the ones whose creative and landing pages already say what they mean, in the language they mean it in, for every market they run.
If you are not sure whether your account's language and landing page alignment would hold up under more automated matching, that is exactly the kind of thing our free 15-point Profit Audit checks, alongside the rest of your account structure and measurement setup. No deck, no obligation, just a straight read on where the risk actually sits.