Google is removing the campaign-level language setting from Search

What disappears from your Search campaigns in late September 2026

Your Search campaigns carry a language setting at campaign level. Google Ads Help says "the campaign-level language targeting setting will be removed", starting September 2026. The Google Ads API Team announcement of 13 August 2026 dates it to late September and names the campaign types in scope: Search, AI Max for Search and Performance Max. Exhibit 1 reads it surface by surface.

Row 1 is where your Search campaigns sit. If you run parallel campaigns in two languages in one account, the setting you are about to lose was not what kept them apart. The control that remains sits one level down, in the ad group: its keywords, and the pages they point at.

The setting never matched ads to the typed language alone

Language targeting reaches people by the languages they understand.

Google's own wording. Language targeting reaches potential customers "based on the languages those customers understand." A user's languages are the "languages the user set, regularly interacted with, or searched in."

Read that against your own supporters. Someone who set their interface to Spanish, reads English every day and has searched in both counts as a user of both languages. Setting a campaign to Spanish put that person inside the target; it never told Google to reach them only when they typed Spanish.

A Spanish query could already return an English ad

Multilingual users may see ads in a language different from their query, where Google is confident they understand the ad language. Google's own example: a Spanish query for "zapatos azules" gets an English ad matched to "blue shoes". If your English campaign has been collecting Spanish searchers, the September removal is not what started it.

Performance Max keeps the setting everywhere except Search

If your account runs Performance Max alongside Search, rows 3 to 5 narrow the setting rather than remove it. It stops applying to Performance Max ads on the Google Search Network and keeps applying on YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. Shopping ads inside Performance Max are not affected by language settings.

Row 2 covers AI Max for Search. The Google Ads API Team announcement puts that format in scope of the same change, so if you have adopted it, read that row the way you read row 1.

Your ad group is the language control now

Two of your ad groups can be eligible for the same search. The keywords and landing pages inside each one decide which of them shows.

Ad group prioritization. AI-based relevance is determined by "the meaning and context of the search term, all the keywords in an ad group, and landing pages within the ad group."

Every input in that sentence lives inside one ad group. Hold Spanish and English keywords in the same group, point them at one page, and Google reads relevance out of both languages at once. Split them: one language of keywords per ad group, and landing pages in that group written in the same language.

The search terms report will not show you every query

Your search terms report shows how your ads performed when actual searches triggered them, limited to terms used by a significant number of people. Google omits some low-volume search terms for privacy. Search terms insights may group low-volume queries into subthemes or "other queries" without showing the queries themselves.

No Spanish queries in the report is not the same as no Spanish queries. The low-volume ones can sit inside a subtheme or outside the report, so read it as evidence of the patterns with volume behind them. If the report is thin because the campaign is serving nothing at all, that is a separate diagnosis: the case where a campaign says Eligible and has no impressions.

GA4's Language dimension reports the browser, not the query

Your second source is Google Analytics, where sessions carry a Language dimension. Google's dimensions and metrics reference defines it as "the name of the language of a user's browser or device".

That tells you how a visitor's device is configured, which stays the same whether the person typed Spanish or English a second earlier. Paired with a report that omits low-volume terms, neither source gives you a complete list of the languages your ads were queried in, so plan the check around what the two do report.

What this means for your account this month

In an Ad Grants account, impressions shown to people who will not click carry a compliance cost. Wrong-language impressions land in the denominator of the click-through rate the Ad Grants account management policy measures: 5% each month, at account level rather than on each keyword, for accounts not exclusively using Smart Campaigns. Missing it for 2 consecutive months temporarily deactivates the account.

Separate the ad groups while the setting is still there, so the structure carrying the language distinction is in place on the day it has to be. If what changes afterwards is volume rather than language, check the budget settings that throttle delivery before reading it as a language effect.

Before the setting goes

Late September 2026 is the date. Find the ad group holding keywords in two languages and split it before then.

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