TL;DR

• What changes: the campaign-level language targeting setting is removed from Search campaigns, AI Max for Search, and the Search Network portion of Performance Max, starting September 2026. Google will use its existing language signals, including ad and landing-page language, search-term language, and the user’s language settings and preferences. When multiple eligible language versions exist, it will prioritize the ad that best matches the user’s search context.
• What doesn’t: language exclusions, which never existed and still won’t. Your account structure. Ad creation and translation, neither of which Google is doing. Performance, according to Google, for the vast majority of advertisers.
• Who it affects most: accounts with creative in more than one language. If yours is English-only, delivery impact should be minimal, but API and reporting tooling that reads language criteria may still need review.
• What to do before September: inventory every creative and landing-page language in the account, make sure each language path is clearly structured for the intended user, stop including language criteria in new and updated Search campaign API requests, audit reporting tooling for criteria that still return but no longer apply, and confirm any language or compliance documentation requirements with your legal or compliance team.

 

Google is removing the campaign-level language targeting setting from Search campaigns and from the Search Network portion of Performance Max, starting in September 2026. Google’s existing language system will instead use signals including ad and landing-page language, the language of the search term, and the user’s language settings and preferences.

We sat in on Google’s briefing on Monday. The announcement itself is fairly simple. The useful part was the hour of questions afterward, where agencies running multilingual and regulated accounts started pushing on what happens at the edges.

Here’s what’s changing, what isn’t, and the five things worth checking in your account before September.

What is changing

Search campaigns and AI Max for Search. The campaign-level language-targeting setting has been removed. Google will use its existing language signals, including the language of the ad and landing page, the search term, and the user’s language settings and preferences, to determine eligibility and routing.

Performance Max, Search Network portion only. The campaign-level language setting no longer applies to ads shown on Google Search. Those behave like standard Search campaigns.

Performance Max, everything else. The campaign-level language setting remains fully active for YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. Shopping ads in Performance Max are unaffected by language settings.

After September, a single Performance Max campaign will have language targeting switched off for its Search traffic and switched on for its YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail traffic. One campaign, one setting, two behaviours depending on where the ad appears. That split is easy to miss because the same Performance Max campaign can exhibit different language behaviour depending on where the ad is served.

AI-based ad group prioritization gets a language dimension. When multiple campaigns or ad groups in different languages are eligible, Google’s existing AI-driven prioritization will use the user’s search context and language preference at auction time, prioritizing ads that match the search-term language. For multilingual users, that is the core routing change.

The API behaviour changes quietly. Google recommends that API users stop including language criteria in new and updated Search campaign requests. Any attempt to add or update CampaignCriterion.language on a Search campaign will return ContextError.OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT. Existing language criteria will still be returned when you query them, even though they are no longer used for Search targeting, and may be removed for hygiene. Performance Max campaigns won’t throw the error, since language still applies on other channels.

If you maintain reporting tooling, note what that means. After September, your scripts can pull a language setting, display it in an audit, and be describing a setting that no longer controls Search targeting.

What is not changing

Language exclusions. They don’t exist today, and they aren’t being added. This is worth stating plainly because it was the single most contested point in the briefing, and because we initially got it wrong ourselves.

There has never been a formal language-exclusion control. Advertisers select the languages they want to target, and some practitioners have used the languages they leave unselected as a de facto filter. That distinction sounds academic until you see what people built on it.

Your account structure. If you run one campaign per language, nothing needs to be restructured. A campaign with Punjabi creative will continue reaching people who understand Punjabi. The mechanism changes; the outcome for a well-built account largely doesn’t.

Ad creation and translation. Nothing is generated. Nothing is translated. Google was emphatic about this and repeated it several times. Existing assets get routed, and that’s all. Any coverage suggesting Google will start writing ads in new languages is wrong.

Performance, according to Google. If your target language and ad language already matched, expect no noticeable change. The exception is accounts where the two deliberately differed, which will now reach more traffic in the ad’s language.

The objections Google didn’t resolve

Several practical objections were raised by practitioners who run multilingual and regulated accounts. Our notes are stronger on the substance than on person-by-person attribution, so we are grouping the concerns rather than attaching each one to a name.

Traveller and non-local targeting. One agency described a pattern that uses language selection as a practical filter: target a country, then select every language except the local one. Once language selection is gone, there is no setting to invert. Google says that when users travel, the system primarily relies on their language preferences, which remain consistent when they travel. That explains Google’s intended routing, but it does not preserve the advertiser’s old inversion workflow.

Irrelevant foreign-language queries. Practitioners raised the familiar case of a local advertiser seeing search terms in languages nobody at the company speaks. Google’s explanation is that those users may also understand English, so the ads can still be eligible. That may be correct, yet still difficult to explain when you are reviewing spend. Google characterized this as a keyword-matching issue and asked for examples of bad matches.

Language and compliance obligations. Quebec’s Charter of the French language regulates the language of commercial advertising, but we have not found anything that makes Google’s campaign-language selector itself a legal proof artifact. The practical question raised in the room was what documentation an organization wants to retain if its internal compliance process previously relied on an explicit campaign setting as part of the paper trail.

Regulated categories. A participant raised a broader governance concern: when the system infers multilingual routing rather than selecting it in the campaign, what evidence does an advertiser retain of how delivery was configured and reviewed? One participant put it this way: “We can’t prove that anymore because we haven’t deliberately chosen that. The AI is deciding for us.” That is a practitioner concern, not a statement of a specific legal requirement.

The group also asked whether reporting would show which languages were served and how they performed. The answer: the search terms report remains the main interface and standard reporting continues to apply. No new language-level segmentation is being added.

The question worth sitting with

Google’s stated rationale is that the setting is redundant, that it’s widely misunderstood, and that removing it eliminates setup errors. All three are defensible. They told us they conducted interviews with a wide range of advertisers and found the setting genuinely misunderstood, and we believe that.

But we were also told in the same session that performance won’t change measurably for the vast majority of advertisers. And that no new reporting will show the effect.

Google is not positioning this as a performance upgrade. It is positioning the change as simplification: fewer settings, fewer setup errors, and similar outcomes for most advertisers. The open question is how fully its research represented the multilingual and regulated use cases raised during the briefing.

We’re not suggesting bad faith. We’re suggesting that “which agencies did you consult, and in which categories?” is a fair question, and it wasn’t asked, including by us.

Five things to check before September

1. Inventory every creative and landing-page language in the account. Include paused campaigns, old ad groups and Performance Max asset groups nobody has opened this year. Confirm that the creative and landing page in each active language path are clearly structured for the intended users. If English is genuinely the only creative and landing-page language present, delivery impact should be minimal. Continue to #2 if your reporting, API tooling or account audits surface language criteria. Most of the accounts we look at end here.

2. Update your API requests and audit reporting tooling for phantom language criteria. Google recommends no longer sending language criteria in new or updated Search campaign requests; existing criteria can be removed for hygiene. If anything you built reads CampaignCriterion.language on Search campaigns, it will keep returning values that no longer affect targeting. Flag it now, before someone makes a decision based on a dashboard that describes a setting that no longer controls Search targeting.

3. Review any deliberate mismatch between selected language, ad language and landing-page language. These accounts deserve the closest review because the manual setting disappears while Google relies on the ad, landing page, search term and user preferences. If the mismatch was intentional, understand why and make sure the intended language path is clear before September.

4. Map your Performance Max campaigns against the channel split. Language settings die on Search and live on YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. If you run PMax across both, document which behaviour applies where, so that whoever picks the account up in six months isn’t reverse-engineering it.

5. If your organization has language or compliance obligations, confirm the documentation you need now. Google can explain how ad delivery will work. Your compliance or legal team should decide what evidence your organization needs to retain once Search no longer records an explicit campaign-level language choice.

What we’re watching next

Nothing announced here changes match types. It does, however, reinforce a control pattern we have already written about: when the system can make a decision reliably enough, the manual setting becomes easier to remove. Our earlier piece, Death to Match Types, made that argument in full: https://hopskipmedia.com/death-to-match-types/.

The other boundary worth tracking is the one Google drew clearly: no asset creation, no translation, existing creative only. That is the current product. Whether automated language-variant generation ever appears later is a separate future question, not part of this announcement.

For most advertisers reading this, the correct response is to check the account, confirm the creative and landing pages are clearly structured in the intended language, and move on. That’s not a dismissal. It’s the accurate answer for most of the accounts we see.

For the minority running multilingual or regulated campaigns, one explicit Search control will disappear in September, and more routing will move into Google’s system. No new language-level reporting is being added specifically to inspect that routing.

If that last paragraph describes an account you’re responsible for, the five checks above are the ones we’re running on our own book before September.