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Google Ads is retiring the language toggle starting this month
Starting late September, Google Ads stops letting you manually target Search campaigns by language and switches to automatic matching based on your ad copy and landing page instead.
A taquería near Lafayette Square has run two Google Search campaigns for three years. One in English. One in Spanish. Same menu, same phone number, same delivery radius. The only thing keeping them apart was a setting called language targeting.
That setting is going away.
Starting in late September 2026, Google is removing campaign-level language targeting from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns. You will no longer tell Google which languages to show your ads to. Google will decide, using the language of your ad copy and its own read of what the person searching actually understands.
What changes
Right now, language targeting is a checkbox. You pick English, Spanish, whatever your campaign needs, and Google only serves your ad to people who match. After the change, that checkbox disappears from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns. Google matches your ad based on the language it's written in, plus signals like the language of the search term and the searcher's own settings.
Performance Max is split. For ads that show up in Google Search, the same automatic matching applies. But Performance Max keeps advertiser-controlled language settings for YouTube, Display, Discover, and Gmail. Shopping ads inside Performance Max were never affected by language settings at all.
Google calls this an improvement to relevance. It also removed a control from your dashboard. You had a lever. Now you don't.
Why it matters if you run two languages
If you have ever built a Spanish-language campaign for a Spanish-language audience, you weren't guessing. Indianapolis has a real bilingual customer base to advertise to: 13.3 percent of the city's population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, per the Census Bureau's 2023 estimate. That is not a rounding error for a west side taquería, a Beech Grove tire shop, or a Southport dentist's office running ads in both languages.
Under the old system, the language setting did the sorting. A Spanish speaker searching in Spanish saw the Spanish campaign. An English speaker saw the English one. Clean split, predictable spend.
Under the new system, Google decides which ad wins based on the ad's own language and what it infers about the searcher, including cases you couldn't control before. Google's own example: someone whose phone is set to Spanish but who searches in English could be shown either ad. That is a real shift in who sees what, and it happens without you touching your account.
The language of your ad is the only targeting dial you have left.
What to do about it
No action is technically required. Existing campaigns will keep running. But three things now carry more weight than they did a month ago.
Split by ad copy, not by setting. If you're running English and Spanish campaigns, make sure the ad group structure and the actual ad text stay cleanly separated by language. Google will lean on the words in your ad to decide who sees it, so a campaign with mixed-language ad copy is going to get messy matching.
Match your landing pages to your ad language. A Spanish-language ad sending someone to an English-only page was already a weak click. It's about to become a mismatch Google is actively trying to avoid rewarding. If you have a Spanish version of your site, the Spanish campaign needs to point there, not to the homepage.
Check performance the week it flips. Watch impressions and click-through rate on any campaign that used language targeting, in the first two weeks after the change lands. If a Spanish campaign's impressions drop or an English campaign starts pulling searches it never used to, that's your signal to tighten the ad copy or the landing page, not to panic and pause the account.
If you manage campaigns through the Google Ads API, there's a smaller technical note: attempts to add or update language criteria on Search campaigns will return an error starting with the rollout. Existing criteria can stay in the account, they just won't do anything anymore.
The bottom line
Google is automating language matching, the same way it already automated bidding, budgets, and half the targeting decisions that used to be manual. For a shop running one language, this changes nothing. For a shop running two, the words on the page just became the whole strategy.
If you're not sure whether your account uses language targeting, that's a five-minute check in Campaign Settings before the end of September. Worth doing before Google makes the decision for you.
Sources
| # | Source | What it backed up |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Google Ads is removing language targeting from Search campaigns, Search Engine Land, Aug. 13, 2026 | Rollout timing, what changes for Search vs. Performance Max, the API error behavior. |
| 2 | About campaign languages, Google Ads Help | How Google's automated language matching works today. |
| 3 | About ad group and asset prioritization, Google Ads Help | How Google's AI-based system picks which ad candidate to serve by language and context. |
| 4 | Google Ads API: Search campaign language targeting changes, Google Ads Developers Blog, Aug. 2026 | Guidance for developers on the CampaignCriterion.language API change. |
| 5 | QuickFacts: Indianapolis city (balance), Indiana, U.S. Census Bureau | 2023 Hispanic or Latino population estimate for Indianapolis. |