Ad group and keyword cost mismatch after enabling AI (Performance Max / broad matching), how to isolate AI-driven cost?

[Khadim Hussain]

Hello everyone,

Until recently, our Ad Group and Keyword level reports were always aligned in terms of cost and click metrics. However, after enabling AI-based matching (e.g., broad match + Performance Max / AI Max landing page matching), we started seeing a growing difference between the ad group and keyword costs.

I’m trying to understand how to quantify or attribute the “AI-driven” cost that no longer maps directly to explicit keywords.

So far, I’ve tried querying the search_term_view in the Google Ads API to capture this missing cost (using segments.search_term_match_source to identify AI-related terms). However, the data returned from search_term_view seems incomplete — it only includes a subset of AI-related traffic and doesn’t reconcile the full cost gap between keyword and ad group reports.

My question:
Is there any reliable way (view, field, or dimension) in the Google Ads API to extract all AI-driven / unlinked search traffic cost — so that

Keyword cost + AI-driven cost ≈ Ad group cost

holds true again?

Or, is this cost intentionally not exposed at the search term or keyword level?

Any official guidance or recommended approach for tracking this AI-related spend would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Khadim Hussain

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi Khadim,

Thank you for reaching out to the Google Ads API support team.

To make sure I fully understand your concern, could you please clarify the following:

• By the statement, "However, after enabling AI-based matching (e.g., broad match + Performance Max / AI Max landing page matching)", what do you mean? Could you elaborate and provide more details with the context of your concern? Are you referring to setting up AI Max in Google Ads?
• You mentioned using search_term_view and the segments.search_term_match_source field to identify AI-related terms. Could you clarify which specific match sources you are including in the request?

Also, provide us with the corresponding uncropped UI screenshots (from your Google Ads account) of the "AI-based matching" that you are referring to. This will help us understand your concern better.

You can send the details via Reply privately to the author option, or direct private reply to this email.

Thanks,
 

Google Ads API Team

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[2025-10-09 04:57:05Z GMT] This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!500Ht01u8fGI:ref" (ADR-00335005)

[Evan R.]

I have the same question after being informed by API support that the AI_MAX keywordless query matches are expected to excluded from the "search_term_view" when a "segments.keyword.*" field is included, as they do not have a keyword object.  The only way to get at these results is to exclude the column - but that would require pulling the report twice - once for keyword based matches and once for all matches, and then de-duping the keyword based data out of the results. 

Ideally it would be possible to pull one query including the keyword matches alone, and another pulling just the AI_MAX matches, but as of right now, that does not seem possible.  You can only get the keyword based ones in isolation, or all of them combined. 

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi,

Allow me to check this query with the rest of our team and one of our colleagues will reach out to you once we have an update on this query.

Thanks,
 

Google Ads API Team

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[2025-10-30 23:11:11Z GMT] This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!500Ht01u8fGI:ref" (ADR-00335005)

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi,

Please note that there is no other way to fetch the requested data in a single query.

Thanks,
 

Google Ads API Team

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[2025-10-31 10:51:22Z GMT] This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!500Ht01u8fGI:ref" (ADR-00335005)