Live since 17 August 2026
Google is taking back the efficiency your campaigns found.
Since 17 August 2026, budget-limited campaigns on Target CPA or Target ROAS are held to perform at the target you set, instead of at the better number Smart Bidding had been finding inside your budget.
If you set a £20 target and your campaign has been delivering £14, that £6 of headroom is what gets handed back. Same budget, more expensive clicks, fewer conversions. Google will not adjust anything for you.
No account access. No login. A read-only script you run yourself.
We ran this across 16 active accounts. Here is what came back.
- Accounts scanned
- 16
- Monthly spend
- £99,000
- Campaigns exposed
- 37
- Monthly spend at risk
- £12,800
Measured on 10 August 2026 across accounts we manage that had live spend in the previous 30 days. We have since corrected our own accounts using the same check this page offers you.
Two things most checks miss
- Portfolio bid strategies. A strategy created on a manager account and shared down is invisible to the obvious API query, so its campaigns look as though they have no target at all. On one account we tested, that hid more than half the exposure.
- Shared targets need blended maths. Several campaigns on one portfolio share a single target, so the right new number comes from their combined performance, not from any single campaign.
Check your own account
Leave your email and we'll generate a Google Ads Script for you. Paste it into your account, press Run, and your report appears at a private link. It takes about two minutes.
What we collect
The script sends campaign names, bidding settings, budgets and 30 days of cost and conversion totals for the account you run it in. That is what the report is built from. The report link stops working after 7 days, and you can download a copy to keep. No advertising identifiers, no customer data, nothing about anyone who clicked your ads. Email hello@searchadengine.com and we'll delete it sooner.
This didn't stop being a problem on the 18th
The rollout is what made it urgent. The condition is permanent: any campaign that becomes budget-limited later, while carrying a target it comfortably beats, starts giving that headroom away. Silently, with no notification, and nothing in your change history to show for it.
SearchAdEngine watches for it continuously, alongside account hygiene, security monitoring, ad drafting and offline conversion import.