What changed in Google's APIs this year — and exactly what to do about it

The whole year in one sentence

Two dated cutoffs will break your stack if you ignore them — the Content API for Shopping shuts down on August 18, 2026, and Dynamic Search Ads auto-upgrade into AI Max in September 2026 — and a third change, the new monthly release cadence, quietly ages your API version out faster than before. Everything else Google shipped this year is opportunity, not obligation. This piece walks each change the same way: what changed, why it matters for your account, and the exact call, payload or migration to run — in priority order, hardest deadline first.

I’m not going to leave any of it at “you should migrate.” At every step there’s the concrete artifact — the endpoint that replaces the old one, the experiment payload, the GAQL query — so you can see exactly what to build before the date arrives.

A word on why this matters at all. For years the Google Ads and Merchant APIs were a slow-moving surface you could touch once a year. That’s over. The platform now ships monthly, two of its biggest surfaces are being switched off, and the control you used to hold by hand is being handed to models. The accounts that come out ahead are the ones that treated this year as a migration project, not a maintenance one.

Deadline #1 — Content API for Shopping → Merchant API (Aug 18, 2026)

This is the hardest date of the year, so it goes first.

What changed. Content API for Shopping v2.1 shuts down on August 18, 2026. Its successor, Merchant API v1, went GA in July 2025, and the intermediate v1beta already sunset on February 28, 2026. The old monolith is replaced by focused sub-APIs — datasources, products, inventories, reports, notifications.

Why it matters for your account. Anything that touches your feed through the old API stops working on that date: feed uploads, supplemental feeds, custom labels, price and stock updates, disapproval reads. Not “nice to migrate” — a hard cutoff. If a daily script keeps your prices in sync, it goes silent on August 18 and your feed slowly drifts out of date until someone notices the lost revenue.

What to do. Rebuild against the sub-API structure. The shape of the migration is mechanical — the host, the path and the resource model change, the intent stays the same. Here is the before/after for the single most common call, a product upsert:

# OLD — Content API for Shopping v2.1 (off on 2026-08-18)
curl -X POST \
  "https://shoppingcontent.googleapis.com/content/v2.1/{merchantId}/products" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "offerId": "SKU-123", "title": "...", "price": {"value":"19.90","currency":"EUR"} }'

# NEW — Merchant API v1 (productInputs sub-API)
curl -X POST \
  "https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/products/v1/accounts/{account}/productInputs:insert?dataSource=accounts/{account}/dataSources/{ds}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "channel": "ONLINE", "offerId": "SKU-123", "contentLanguage": "en", "feedLabel": "US",
        "attributes": { "title": "...", "price": {"amountMicros":"19900000","currencyCode":"EUR"} } }'

(Endpoint hosts and the sub-API split are from Google’s docs; confirm the exact request body for your resource against the Merchant API reference before you ship — field names changed, not just the URL.)

The destination is genuinely better than the thing it replaces, which is the part nobody tells you. Three improvements you inherit for free by migrating:

If you’ve been meaning to harden your feed tooling, the shutdown is the forcing function: rebuild once, exit with cleaner error handling and fewer round-trips than v2.1 ever allowed.

Deadline #2 — Dynamic Search Ads → AI Max (Sep 2026)

The second dated change, and the one that reshapes how much control you hold.

What changed. AI Max for Search reached GA on April 15, 2026 after launching in beta in May 2025. From September 2026 Google auto-upgrades all remaining DSA, automatically-created assets and campaign-level broad match into AI Max. After that you can’t create a new DSA campaign — not in the UI, not in Editor, not through the API.

Why it matters for your account. The trade is control for lift. With the full feature set — search-term matching plus text customization plus final-URL expansion — Google reports about +7 % conversions or conversion value over term matching alone. In return you hand the model the matching, the asset text and the landing-URL choice. If you have brand or compliance rules baked into your DSA setup by hand, a silent September upgrade can quietly start sending traffic to URLs and copy you didn’t sign off on.

What to do. Don’t wait to find out what the upgrade does to your numbers — measure it now. Google shipped the guardrails and the measurement hooks through the API in step with the feature, so you can A/B the switch on your own data before it’s mandatory:

The practical move is the last one: create an ADOPT_AI_MAX experiment across accounts, let it run, then read the real delta with a normal GAQL pull — instead of finding out after the upgrade is irreversible:

-- After ADOPT_AI_MAX runs: read the keywordless match, then the trial delta
SELECT campaign.name,
       metrics.conversions,
       metrics.conversions_value,
       metrics.cost_micros
FROM targeting_expansion_view
WHERE segments.date DURING LAST_30_DAYS

(ADOPT_AI_MAX is one of the new experiment types shipped in v24.1; targeting_expansion_view is the v22 reporting resource. Confirm field availability against the release notes for the version you call.)

Deadline #3 (rolling) — monthly releases, shorter shelf life

Not a single date, but a clock that’s now always ticking.

What changed. From v23 (January 28, 2026) the Google Ads API shifted to a monthly release cadence: four major versions a year plus monthly minor versions, with one year of support per major version.

Why it matters for your account. Faster access to features, and faster obsolescence. Versions age out on a published schedule — v20 reaches end-of-life in June 2026, v21 in August, v22 in October. A monthly minor bump is non-breaking; missing a major sunset means your scripts start returning errors with no warning beyond a date in a calendar you weren’t watching.

What to do. Pin your version and watch the sunset calendar. The cheapest insurance is a recurring check that knows which version you call and alerts ~60 days before it expires — the API even reports the request version back, so the check is a few lines:

# Recurring guardrail: alert ~60 days before your pinned version sunsets.
from datetime import date

PINNED = "v22"                 # the version your client is pinned to
SUNSET = {"v20": "2026-06-01", "v21": "2026-08-01", "v22": "2026-10-01"}  # from sunset-dates page
sunset = SUNSET.get(PINNED)    # None until your version reaches the published calendar
if sunset and (date.fromisoformat(sunset) - date.today()).days < 60:
    alert(f"{PINNED} sunsets {sunset} — schedule the version bump")  # major bump needs a re-test

A 404 from a sunset version is a self-inflicted outage. Treat version governance as a standing recurring task, not a fire drill.

Now the upside — AI moves into creative and feed

With the deadlines handled, the rest of the year is leverage you adopt on your own schedule. Two services turned asset and feed work into something you can script across thousands of SKUs:

• AssetGenerationService — Ads API, v22, closed beta: AI text and image generation, with PMax image enhancement and extraction; v23.2 added VideoEnhancement for Google-generated video. Creative generation moves out of the UI into a programmable layer.
• Product Studio — Merchant API, alpha since April 2025: AI-generated product titles and descriptions, plus AutomatedDiscounts for real-time pricing. Feed quality is the ceiling on Shopping and PMax performance, so rewriting titles at the API level means bulk-improving thousands of SKUs without manual work.

The concrete pipeline this unlocks: read a SKU from the feed → generate a compliant title/description and image assets → push them straight into the asset group, with no manual Canva step in the middle. Both services are pre-GA — treat them as a pilot on a slice of the catalogue, not a catalogue-wide rollout, until they graduate.

And the plumbing — Ads and Merchant in one place

The most underrated change of the year is unglamorous: the two halves of an e-commerce account finally meet.

What changed. As of April 22, 2026, the Merchant API is reachable from Google Ads Scripts. Combined with product_filters (conditional feed sharing with Google Ads, shipped November 2025) and CartDataSalesView (v24), the loop between feed health and ad spend closes inside one environment.

Why it matters for your account. The old split — campaigns in Scripts, feed managed somewhere else — meant a disapproved product kept burning budget until a human noticed. Now one script can react to a feed disapproval by pausing a campaign or pulling the SKU from a PMax listing group. And CartDataSalesView brings product-level conversion segmentation into the API, so you get SKU-level ROAS without manually stitching campaign data to the feed:

-- Product-level ROAS straight from the API (v24+), no manual feed stitching
SELECT segments.product_item_id,
       metrics.conversions_value,
       metrics.cost_micros
FROM cart_data_sales_view
WHERE segments.date DURING LAST_30_DAYS
ORDER BY metrics.conversions_value DESC

That single query is the input to a profitability tiering you used to rebuild by hand every month. (Resource is cart_data_sales_view, shipped in v24; confirm segment availability in the release notes for your version.)

The year on one timeline

Every major version below comes from the official release notes; the Merchant milestones from the Merchant API latest updates. The right-hand column is the only one that should drive your calendar — everything dated is non-negotiable.

[HARD Aug 18] 1. Feed migration → off v2.1, onto Merchant sub-APIs
[HARD Sep]    2. DSA inventory → run ADOPT_AI_MAX A/B first
[ROLLING]     3. Version watch → alert 60 days pre-sunset
[upside]      4. Asset pipeline → AssetGenerationService / Product Studio
[upside]      5. SKU ROAS → cart_data_sales_view tiering
[upside]      6. Closed loop → Merchant-in-Scripts: disapproval → pause

FAQ