Google Ads’ help center describes a setting inside AI Max for Search campaigns called “Text customization.” Turn AI Max on for a campaign and the box comes checked by default: Google’s systems can then write new headlines and descriptions for your ad and start serving them, without routing that new copy back through your account for a second look. The same help page walks through how to uncheck it, which tells you something useful on its own. Google expects some advertisers to want out.
That’s one of four defaults now running quietly across the two ad platforms most B2B accounts touch. Performance Max optimizes the text, images and video in an asset group on its own. Demand Gen can generate a video ad from the assets you uploaded. Over on Meta, Advantage+ Creative Enhancements adjust an ad’s layout, color and text placement at the moment it serves, and the adjustment varies by placement: a feed ad and a Reels ad built from the same creative won’t necessarily look alike. For an account running a seasonal promotion, none of this usually matters. The platform tweaks, performance improves, nobody checks the fine print. For an account in a regulated sector, or operating under a strict brand charter, the question is different: does the platform’s approval still match what you’re contractually or legally required to say? We’ve already looked at one version of that gap: the growing distance between what Google approves and what actually gets served. This article covers a related but different question: what can rewrite the creative itself after approval, with no new review triggered at all.
What Google Ads can change after you click approve
Inside AI Max, text customization and a second setting called final URL expansion travel together. Google’s own instructions show where to find both: open a campaign, go to AI Max, and look under “Asset optimization.” Uncheck text customization there and the automatically written assets stop serving. But the same help page adds a detail worth knowing before you touch anything: turning off text customization also turns off final URL expansion for that campaign. You can’t keep one and drop the other. The two live behind a single switch wearing two names.
There’s a second catch specific to responsive search ads. If you’ve pinned a line, locking one headline or description so it always runs exactly as written, that pin is meant to survive optimization. Google’s AI Max FAQ states plainly that when both text customization and final URL expansion are turned on, pinning is not respected. A line you pinned precisely because legal or compliance signed off on that exact wording can still be swapped out underneath you.
Performance Max works at a wider scale. An asset group pulls in the text, images, logos and video you upload, and Google’s AI can generate or recombine assets based on your landing page, domain and existing creative, aiming for whatever combination it predicts will perform best. One narrower piece of that system does offer independent control: image enhancements, meaning smart cropping and the overlay of text or logos onto an image, carries its own opt-in and opt-out, separate from the rest of the asset group’s automation. If your account recently folded Local Services Ads into Performance Max, that opt-out is one of several settings worth revisiting; we laid out the fuller migration checklist here.
Demand Gen gives you more say at the moment of creation and less afterward. Google’s AI can turn the images and text you’ve uploaded into a short auto-generated video, and you see it before it runs: the campaign review page previews each suggested video, lets you accept one with a single click, or deselect any you don’t want. The part worth checking before accepting is whether a disclaimer or mandatory line present in your source image survived the conversion to video. If your account is migrating from Display Ads, the same review belongs in that move too; we covered that checklist separately.
What Meta changes, and why the opt-out needs a second look
Meta’s Advantage+ Creative Enhancements sit at the ad level: automatic touch-ups to color, font, layout and text placement, applied right before the ad serves. The adjustment isn’t fixed. A feed placement and a Reels placement can enhance the same base creative differently. In Ads Manager, each enhancement (visual touch-ups, text rewrites, auto-crop) carries its own toggle, so switching off one doesn’t switch off the rest. On paper, that’s more granular than Google’s coupled AI Max switch.
Where it gets more technical is for any account managed through Meta’s Marketing API rather than the Ads Manager interface, which is how a fair number of agencies run B2B accounts at scale. Since the API’s version 22 update in January 2025, each Advantage+ feature carries its own enroll_status flag, set to either OPT_IN or OPT_OUT, replacing what used to be a single bundle toggle. Sending an OPT_OUT through the API is not the same as confirming Meta kept it. Independent analysis of the API’s behavior has found that an ineligible feature can get silently dropped from the request, with no error returned, so what was sent and what actually applies can diverge without anyone noticing. If an agency or an API integration manages the account, the practical move is to ask whether they verify the setting after sending it (reading the creative back and comparing it) rather than trusting the request alone.
Platform approval was never a compliance test
Google and Meta’s review process checks an ad against platform policy: no prohibited content, no misleading claims under their own definition of misleading. It was never built to check an ad against your sector’s specific rules. An AI rewrite that stays entirely within platform policy, a new headline, a cropped image, a swapped line of text, can still drop a disclaimer, a required disclosure, or the specific phrase that was the actual reason legal or compliance approved the original version.
The clearest example comes from the US, where HIPAA governs how healthcare data can be used, including in ad targeting and customer-list matching. That’s a US-specific rule, and the closest international equivalents aren’t a single law so much as a patchwork: sector-specific obligations in finance, insurance, healthcare and legal services, plus data protection rules like the GDPR in the EU that apply regardless of sector. The point generalizes past any one jurisdiction: a setting that complies with platform policy says nothing about whether it complies with your sector’s own rules.
Worth separating this from a different, EU-specific obligation: content labeling under the AI Act concerns disclosing that AI generated something, a legal requirement that exists independently of any platform setting. What’s described here are product settings inside Google Ads and Meta Ads that can alter creative after approval; neither disabling them nor leaving them on changes what the AI Act requires. Checking these defaults is a creative-control step, not a substitute for your own compliance or legal review.
None of this needs a full platform audit to start. A short list, run against your own account, covers the defaults most likely to matter in a regulated or brand-controlled context:
- In Google Ads, open AI Max → Asset optimization and check whether text customization is on, remembering that disabling it also disables final URL expansion.
- In Performance Max, check the separate opt-in for automatic image enhancements, and confirm which assets, if any, are pinned.
- In Demand Gen, preview any auto-generated video before accepting it, specifically for dropped disclaimers.
- In Meta Ads Manager, check each Advantage+ Creative toggle individually, not just at the account level.
- If an agency or API manages the account, ask how opt-outs are verified after they’re sent, not only how they’re set.
Knowing which four switches exist, where each one lives, and what changes the moment it’s on matters more than switching every one of them off. Skip that audit in a regulated account, and the risk is finding out the hard way that a platform’s approval and its own rulebook were never the same document. We’ve asked a related question before: once an AI agent is making day-to-day decisions in your account, who’s actually accountable for what it changes. The audit above is the groundwork for answering that.
If this changed how you think about one of your account’s defaults, write in. We’re curious.
Photo credits: Pixabay/sakibmia24, Pixabay/AS_Photography, Pixabay/StartupStockPhotos.
