Exact and phrase match were the two keyword types Google had kept out of AI Mode. On September 4, 2026, Google's Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed they can now serve text ads there when a query shows "explicit and direct user intent," calling it "a small experiment that recently kicked off." The confirmation followed the account data rather than leading it: independent ad consultant Anthony Higman spotted the change in live campaign data and posted it to LinkedIn the same day, and Search Engine Roundtable and ppc.land both corroborated it independently on September 4, 2026. Google has not published which query types qualify, or when the test might expand, so an account running tightly-scoped exact and phrase match campaigns has no published way to tell whether some of its current impressions are already landing inside AI Mode.
Credibility: HIGH — a named, on-record quote from Google's official Ads Liaison, corroborated the same day by two independent trade-press outlets and by the practitioner who spotted it first. The deduction, stated before the numbers rather than after them: the scale figures below are ppc.land's own reporting and were not independently re-verified by us.
Facts:
- Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, confirmed on September 4, 2026 that exact and phrase match keywords can now serve text ads inside AI Mode, describing it as "a small experiment that recently kicked off."
- Eligibility is capped to queries showing "explicit and direct user intent." Google has not published a defined list of qualifying query types.
- Before this test, only broad match keywords and AI Max / Performance Max for Search campaigns could serve ads inside AI Mode.
- AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users by Google I/O 2026 (May 2026) and showed ads on roughly 30% of ad-eligible queries as of August 2026, per ppc.land; Google Ads still has no reporting field that separates AI Mode delivery from standard Search delivery within the same keyword row.
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A tightly-scoped exact match keyword used to make two decisions at once: which words trigger the ad, and whether that ad could appear inside Google's automated surfaces. Inside this test it makes only the first. For whoever owns AI visibility rather than the ad account, that second decision is the one worth reclaiming, because AI Mode is the surface the organic work is judged on and some of the brand's own paid spend may now be landing in it with no line in the report to say so. Then notice what Google did not say. It has not published which queries count as "explicit and direct user intent," has not said how many accounts are in the test, and called the whole thing small. The defensible position this week is that you cannot rule your own account out of it, not that it is already running at scale.
This week:
- Ask your paid-media team to pull search terms and auction insights for the exact and phrase match campaigns and flag anything that moved without a bid or budget change. Google's keyword rows will not label AI Mode impressions separately, so unexplained movement is the only tell available.
- Put the question to your Google account rep in writing: is this account inside the experiment? The eligibility criteria are not public, and the answer decides whether the movement above is worth chasing.
- Write down why a client's exact match campaign stays opted out of automated match-expansion products. That trade-off used to buy match-type control at the price of AI Mode reach; this test says the two are no longer mutually exclusive, and a rationale recorded before the test expands is worth more than one reconstructed after.
Search Engine Roundtable: Barry Schwartz, "Google Ads Tests Serving Search Ads With Restrictive Match Types In AI Mode," Search Engine Roundtable, 2026-09-04, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ads-serving-restrictive-match-types-ai-mode-42024.html
ppc.land: Luis Rijo, "Exact and phrase match keywords gain AI Mode ads in Google test," ppc.land, 2026-09-04, https://ppc.land/exact-and-phrase-match-keywords-gain-ai-mode-ads-in-google-test/