Performance Max Auto Assets 2026: Take Back Control

Open any Performance Max campaign right now and look for a dropdown called Asset optimization. Inside it there are two checkboxes: Sourced videos and Landing page images. At least one of them is probably already ticked — and you did not tick it. These are Performance Max auto assets, live in your account.

That checkbox gives Google permission to go and find video on your linked YouTube channel and your social accounts, pull images straight off your landing page, and run both as live ad assets carrying your brand name. It is not a bug and not a quiet experiment. In 2026, automatic visual assets became the default state of a Performance Max campaign rather than an opt-in convenience for advertisers with no creative team.

This article covers what exactly gets switched on, where the controls live, how to turn them off in under two minutes, and — the part that actually matters — when letting Google source your creative makes money and when it quietly damages brand and reporting.

Performance Max auto assets: three automations, three different switches

These get lumped together constantly, which is why people turn off the wrong thing. They are distinct mechanisms with distinct controls.

1. Sourced videos — Google finds existing video you already published

The newest and the most contested. Google crawls sources it treats as yours — your linked YouTube channel, the campaign’s landing page, and per Google’s help documentation your public brand social accounts — selects clips, and adds them to the asset group as real video assets.

Volume: Google’s documentation indicates up to 10 sourced videos per asset group (treat this as a reference figure and confirm it in your own account), on top of anything you uploaded or Google generated.
Selection logic: relevance to the asset group, estimated performance potential, and format fit — aspect ratio and length.
Where it serves from: a Google-owned YouTube channel branded with your logo and business name. Viewers see your brand; the channel is not yours.
Threshold: a daily budget above roughly $5 is referenced in the documentation (reference figure).
Default state: “enabled by default for all new campaigns.” A number of advertisers also report the setting appearing switched on in older campaigns after a platform update.

That last point is the trap. “New campaigns only” sounds containable, but accounts have found the box ticked on campaigns built months ago. Audit everything, not just this quarter’s builds.

2. Landing page images — pulled straight from your site

Mechanically simpler: Google extracts images from the final URL and drops them into rotation as image assets. Technically this is the old Dynamic Image Extension, which used to be governed by a single account-level toggle.

The date to diary is December 4, 2026. Reporting on the Google Ads Developer Blog indicates that from that day image extraction defaults to on for newly created Performance Max campaigns — even when Dynamic Image Extension is off at account level. In other words, the account toggle stops being a reliable master switch: a new campaign can arrive with its own enabled setting.

3. Generative assets — Google builds new creative from your old creative

The third layer is not “find”, it is “manufacture”. Google Ads API v22 added values to the AssetAutomationType enum that map the direction of travel clearly:

API value	What it does	Default state
`GENERATE_IMAGE_ENHANCEMENT`	AutoCrop and AutoEnhance applied to your own images	Opted in for Performance Max
`GENERATE_IMAGE_EXTRACTION`	Image extraction from the site	Inherits the account-level Dynamic Image Extension value
`GENERATE_DESIGN_VERSIONS_FOR_IMAGES`	Adds design elements and text to images for different aspect ratios	Opted in for Demand Gen multi-asset ads
`GENERATE_VIDEOS_FROM_OTHER_ASSETS`	Assembles video from your images and text	Opted in for Demand Gen multi-asset ads

Read the wording on the first row: “Opted in by default for pmax.” That is not an invitation. If you have never opened Asset optimization, assume some of this is already running.

The 2026 rule for Performance Max: more is switched on than you switched on. A campaign audit now starts with the list of automations, not with the list of assets — because the automations are what produce the assets.

Where the controls are and how to switch them off

As of late October 2026 (the UI moves, so navigate by label rather than by position):

Open the Performance Max campaign and go to its asset groups.
Find the Asset optimization dropdown in the asset group settings, next to the asset creation panel.
Inside are individual checkboxes for Sourced videos (often carrying a “New” label) and Landing page images.
Next to Sourced videos sits Manage sources — the list of URLs and channels Google treats as yours and is allowed to crawl. Prune it.
Untick what you do not want and hit Apply. The change applies to the asset group you are in.

Separately, check Account settings → Dynamic Image Extension. After December 4 it no longer automatically governs new PMax campaigns, but it still controls Search, so you need to know its state.

Past ten campaigns, clicking through each asset group is a waste of a morning. Pull the state in bulk instead — the asset_automation_setting field is exposed at campaign level, so one query returns every automation across the account. If you have not built that muscle yet, start with our comparison of the Google Ads API versus scripts.

Why Google is doing this

Understanding the motive leads to better decisions than arguing about whether it is fair. There are three reasons and all of them are economic.

Video inventory scarcity. Performance Max and Demand Gen sell impressions on YouTube, Shorts and Discover. Those slots exist whether or not the advertiser uploaded a video. With no video, Google previously assembled a slideshow from images and text — a format that performs poorly and degrades the surface. A real brand clip is objectively better than an auto-assembled one, so Google would rather find yours.

The vertical format problem. Shorts growth demands 9:16, while the overwhelming majority of advertisers upload 16:9. Crawling social accounts solves this cheaply: brands already produce vertical content on Instagram and TikTok, it just never reached the ads account.

Lowering the barrier to launch. The fewer assets required before a campaign can start, the more campaigns start. For a small business with no designer and no videographer, auto assets are the difference between launching and abandoning the build.

The honest conclusion: this feature is not aimed at you, it is aimed at the empty slot. The friction appears when you do have considered creative, the platform adds found material next to it, and then allocates impressions between the two on its own.

What to do when you run fifty campaigns or more

Manual inspection stops scaling fast — roughly a minute per asset group plus the risk of missing a campaign entirely. Bulk control has three steps.

Export the state. Query the asset automation settings field at campaign level through the Google Ads API, alongside campaign IDs and names. You end up with a “campaign → automations enabled” table.
Diff against policy. Keep a simple policy file: which state is correct for which campaign type. Brand campaigns — everything off; shopping — image extraction permitted; test campaigns — anything goes. The gap between export and policy is your task list.
Make it recurring. Schedule the export and diff it week over week. That is the only way to catch the platform enabling something itself: no interface notification fires for these settings, and change history does not always record system-side toggles.

Agencies should bake automation state into account handover. It cannot be enforced at manager-account level, so the check belongs in onboarding for every new account you take over — see our guide to manager account operations.

Auto assets and account-level branding

An easily missed layer: sourced videos serve from a Google-owned channel branded with your logo and business name. That makes the accuracy of those two assets more consequential than it used to be.

Logo. Confirm a current square logo at adequate resolution is uploaded at account level. An outdated version will accompany every automated placement.
Business name. It appears in ads and should match the name on the site. A mismatch between ad and landing page is a recurring source of review friction.
Brand guidelines. Fonts and palette apply to generated assets, but they do not retouch sourced video. Do not expect guidelines to bring an off-brand clip into line.
One source of truth. If the brand has several legal names or regional spellings, fix one for advertising, or the automation will use different ones in different campaigns.

A 20-minute audit checklist

Every PMax campaign, not only recent ones — Performance Max auto assets can be active in campaigns built long before the feature shipped. Export the list and walk each asset group.
Manage sources. Expect forgotten entries: a dormant corporate YouTube channel full of five-year-old footage, regional accounts, an agency’s channel from a previous engagement.
The landing page, read as a crawler would. Which images does Google see first? Team photos, UI screenshots, stock filler, payment-method icons — all candidates for your next ad.
The Assets tab, sorted by date added. Anything you did not upload is the automation at work.
Asset performance report: check whether sourced video has crowded out your produced creative on impressions.
Brand guidelines. If you have configured brand guidelines in Google Ads, confirm fonts and colors applied — they shape generated assets, but they do not retouch sourced video.

When sourcing helps and when it hurts

The honest answer depends on the maturity of your creative process. Automation wins where the alternative is nothing, and loses where the alternative is a considered asset.

Situation	Call	Reasoning
No in-house video at all	Leave Sourced videos on	An asset group without video gets an auto-generated slideshow anyway — better it is built from your footage than from captions on a colour card
Ecommerce, thousands of SKUs, visuals live in the feed	Landing page images is defensible	Product pages yield clean imagery, usually better than three hand-uploaded banners covering the whole campaign
Premium brand, strict guidelines	Switch everything off except AutoCrop	One stray landing-page photo in an ad costs more than the incremental reach is worth
Lead gen in a regulated vertical	Off, especially Sourced videos	Footage shot for another market or with expired claims can put you outside policy
Heavy UGC or licensed imagery on site	Landing page images off	A licence that covers your website does not automatically cover paid media
Testing a new offer, thin data	On, with a tightly pruned source list	Early on, signal volume matters more than a perfect frame

Three risks that never show up in the dashboard

Rights and licensing

The most underrated exposure. An image licensed for “website use” is frequently not licensed for paid advertising — stock agreements routinely separate those. Same with video: a clip featuring a model under a one-year release may still sit on the channel long after the release lapsed. The automation does not read contracts. It reads file availability.

Mixed markets and stale offers

If your channel holds footage for several countries with different prices, currencies and terms, Google can surface the wrong one. For any campaign where price or promo terms are spoken on camera, that is a direct route to a mismatch between ad and landing page — which lands you against Google Ads destination requirements.

Reporting you can no longer trust

Once assets you did not create appear in the group, every “the new creative is working” conclusion gets shaky. You can read a conversion lift as proof your new hero video landed, when the lift is being carried by a three-year-old clip Google found. Set a baseline before enabling anything, and isolate the effect with Performance Max asset experiments.

Measuring the effect honestly

Asset report. Impression share and performance label per asset. Fast, but it cannot answer “would we be better off without these”.
Channel-level reporting. Enabling Sourced videos visibly shifts distribution toward YouTube. If the video share climbed and CPA climbed with it, you bought cheap reach rather than conversions — see our walkthrough of Performance Max channel-level reporting.
A real experiment. Clone the campaign with automations off, run it against the current one for two weeks at matched budget, and compare conversion value — not CPC.

If you are running on an agency account and would rather not disturb a well-trained campaign to answer a creative question, keep a separate account for tests. That is precisely what many teams use agency accounts from PPC Rebels for — isolating experiments from the account carrying the revenue.

Turning this into a process

Default-on automation is the new baseline, and a one-off audit will not hold it. What works:

Launch rule. “Check Asset optimization” becomes a line in the PMax launch checklist. New campaign, new check.
Monthly sweep. Export automation state across all campaigns once a month and diff against last month. Any delta means the platform changed something on its own.
One approved source. A single official channel that is safe to crawl. Everything else comes out of Manage sources.
A clean landing page. Stripping visual clutter helps both the crawler and your conversion rate — covered in our guide to landing page A/B tests for paid traffic.
A change log. Every toggle recorded with a date, or next month nobody can explain the step change in the metrics.

If an automated asset already caused damage

Untick Sourced videos in the affected asset groups and hit Apply.
Go to the Assets tab, find the asset, and remove it from the group — disabling the setting does not always retire assets already added.
Clean Manage sources so the same file cannot return if the setting is re-enabled.
Check whether the same asset propagated into other campaigns sharing those sources.
Record the date so the affected reporting period can be read correctly.

If the automated asset triggered a policy disapproval, work it through Policy Manager and the appeals flow rather than re-uploading the same creative and hoping.

The takeaway

Performance Max keeps moving toward “give us an input and a goal, we will assemble the rest.” Sourced videos and image extraction are the next step, and from December 4, 2026 that step becomes the default state for new campaigns. Neither panic nor blind trust is the right response.

The working position on Performance Max auto assets: know what is enabled, keep the source list clean, enable automation where you genuinely have no creative, disable it where creative is part of the product — and settle the question with an experiment rather than a feeling. Done that way, auto assets are a free extension of your creative range instead of a lottery with your brand as the stake.

FAQ

Are Sourced videos enabled in my campaigns by default?

For all new Performance Max campaigns, yes, per Google’s documentation. Some existing campaigns also had the setting switched on during a platform update. The only reliable check is opening Asset optimization in each asset group or exporting automation state through the API.

Where does Google get the video from?

From sources it treats as yours: the linked YouTube channel, the campaign landing page, and public brand social accounts. The list is editable through the Manage sources link beside the setting.

How many sourced videos can appear in one asset group?

Google’s documentation points to up to 10 per asset group, on top of uploaded and generated assets. Treat it as a reference figure — limits of this kind change without announcement.

What happens on December 4, 2026?

Per Google Ads Developer Blog reporting, from that date image extraction from the landing page defaults to on for newly created Performance Max campaigns, independent of the account-level Dynamic Image Extension setting. No automatic enablement has been announced for existing campaigns.

Will disabling auto assets hurt my Ad Strength?

Probably yes, because the platform rewards asset count and variety. But Ad Strength is a completeness hint, not a performance metric. Decide on conversion value, not on the colour of the indicator.

Can I switch this off account-wide in one action?

There is no single master switch for Sourced videos — it lives at asset group level. Dynamic Image Extension is account-level, but after December 4 it stops automatically applying to new PMax campaigns. For bulk control, use the API or scripts.

Do sourced videos run from my own YouTube channel?

No. Per Google’s description they serve from a Google-owned channel branded with your logo and business name, so those impressions never appear in your own channel analytics.

How do auto assets affect creative experiments?

Badly, if ignored: assets that were never in the test plan appear mid-flight and destroy comparability. Before running an asset experiment, confirm automation state is identical in both arms.

Is there a copyright risk?

Yes, for imagery and footage whose licence covers the website but not paid media, and for material with an expired model release. Responsibility for what runs stays with the advertiser, so brands working with licensed content are safer leaving extraction off.

Should I just leave everything on?

If you have no video and no production budget, yes — it fills the video slot better than text-to-slideshow generation. If creative is part of your positioning and you control it, switch off and upload your own. The middle path is leaving only AutoCrop and AutoEnhance active, since both operate on your own files.

How do I see which assets the automation added?

In the Assets tab inside the asset group, sort by date added and compare against your own upload log. Anything unaccounted for arrived automatically.

Is this related to the new customer value multipliers?

Not mechanically, but both belong to the same October 2026 wave of campaign-level automation. The other half is covered in our article on percentage multipliers for new customer value.

Performance Max Auto Assets 2026: Google Sources Your Videos