Text customization is a Google Ads setting that writes extra headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads from your landing pages, existing ads and keywords. It was formerly called automatically created assets and now sits inside AI Max for Search, where it's on by default.
Text customization is a Google Ads setting that writes extra headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads from your landing pages, existing ads and keywords. It was formerly called automatically created assets and now sits inside AI Max for Search.
What does text customization write, and from what?
Extra headlines and descriptions that join the ones you wrote. Google’s text customization help page says it combines “light-touch” extraction, taking snippets from landing page titles, descriptions and meta tags, with generative AI grounded in your landing page.
The output follows the responsive search ad format: up to 15 headlines of 30 characters and 4 descriptions of 90 characters per ad. Google says generated assets are reviewed and refreshed at least every 48 hours, and only serve “if they are predicted to perform better than the headlines and description lines you uploaded.”
What do real product pages give it to work with?
Often less than you’d expect. On 18 October 2026 we fetched 15 product pages from Shopify stores and read 2 of the inputs Google names: the HTML title and the meta description.
2 of 15 pages had no meta description at all, and 5 of the 13 that had one ran past 160 characters, the longest at 320. Kylie Cosmetics’ description repeated the product title word for word; Cupshe’s was a brand slogan. Only 2 of 15 titles were short enough to work as a 30-character headline as they stand. The easy fixes:
- Give every product page its own meta description.
- Put the main selling point in its first 90 characters, the length of an ad description.
- State product facts such as material, size or price, not a slogan.
How do you control what Google writes?
With previews, text guidelines and the asset report. When you add a final URL, Google generates up to 10 example headlines and descriptions, mostly in under 30 seconds, and you don’t need to turn the setting on to see them. Text guidelines let you exclude terms and set tone; Google’s help page describes them as a feature it is testing.
After launch, the Added by column shows which assets Google created, and you can remove any of them. Generated assets also count toward your responsive search ad’s Ad Strength rating, so a Good rating may lean on text you didn’t write. Google’s own best practice is to keep your headlines and descriptions in place and fill the gaps that remain. Switching text customization off reports its assets as removed, and it also switches off final URL expansion, which depends on it.
When does it switch on without you choosing it?
In 2 cases. New AI Max campaigns have it on by default, and campaigns that used automatically created assets were moved to AI Max for Search from September 2026, with search term matching and text customization both on. Google’s upgrade post kept that date in its 11 June 2026 update. If a campaign changed on its own, check its AI Max panel. Our AI Max migration audit does that review, and the Google Ads for e-commerce guide covers the rest of the account.