Google Just Gave You the Guardrails Everyone's Been Screaming For (Now What?)

The pace right now is honestly wild

Google's rolling out major updates every other week. AI features are shipping mid-campaign season. Your competitors are testing new automation tools while you're still reading the release notes from last month's changes.

If you don't have a team that lives and breathes this stuff—that catches these updates the day they drop and knows how to adapt your campaigns before your competition does—you're already falling behind.

Which brings me to what just landed this week.

Look, I need to talk about what Google just rolled out—because it's either going to save your brand from an embarrassing AI-generated disaster, or it's going to give you a false sense of security right before one happens anyway.

Google's new Text Guidelines feature is now appearing in Google Ads accounts. Finally. After months of marketers watching AI spit out ad copy that ranged from "technically correct but completely off-brand" to "did our AI just say what to a customer?"

Here's what it actually does: it lets you set campaign-level parameters that guide Google's AI when it's generating text for your ads. Think of it as training wheels for the algorithm. Or guard rails. Or—if we're being honest—damage control.

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud

Here's the thing about AI-generated ad copy that everyone's been dancing around: Google Ads has been leaning deeper into AI-powered creative, and advertisers have been smiling and nodding while quietly freaking out.

Performance Max. AI Max for Search. Automatically created assets. Google's been automating the hell out of ad creation, and the pitch has always been the same: "Trust us, the AI knows what converts."

And sure, sometimes it does. But other times? It generates copy that's technically compliant but sounds nothing like your brand. Or worse—it creates messaging that's almost okay but just off enough to make your CMO send you a Slack message with three question marks.

The data Google's been sitting on must be wild. Because you don't build a feature like Text Guidelines unless enough advertisers have been complaining loud enough about AI going rogue.

What This Actually Gives You

The feature works at the campaign level and only kicks in when text customization is turned on. You get two ways to control the AI:

Term exclusions:

Block specific words. Pretty straightforward. If you add "Don't imply our products are discounted," the AI steers away from terms like "cheap" or "bargain."

Natural language instructions:

This is where it gets interesting. Instead of writing ads, you teach the AI to write ads that sound like you. You give it brand voice descriptions, example sentences, tone guidelines—and it's supposed to replicate your style across thousands of ad variations.

One example that caught my attention: a B2B software company told their AI to sound "confident and direct, focusing on business outcomes rather than technical features" for senior decision-makers who care about ROI, not IT specs. Their AI Max campaigns started generating headlines like "Reduce Operating Costs by 34%" instead of generic feature lists, and lead quality improved by 52%.

That's the promise, anyway.

Here's the Thing: We've Been Doing This Already

If you've been obsessive about brand voice and messaging consistency—and we have—this isn't revolutionary. This is Google finally building a tool to scale what the best agencies have been doing manually.

We've been writing detailed brand guidelines, testing messaging variations, and quality-checking AI outputs for years. Every time Google pushes more automation, we've adapted by getting more precise about what "on-brand" actually means and how to measure it.

Text Guidelines just makes that process more systematic. For us, it's another lever to pull. For agencies that haven't been thinking this way? It's going to be a wake-up call.

The Part Where I'm Skeptical

Here's where my antenna goes up:

This is explicitly labeled as "an experimental beta" by Google. They're telling you upfront—this might not work perfectly yet.

Also, term exclusions operate as exact matches and don't support partial word blocking or complex pattern matching. So if you're in a regulated industry trying to stay compliant with nuanced legal language? Good luck with that.

And here's the real kicker: messaging restrictions rely on natural language processing to interpret intent, requiring clear and specific instruction formatting for optimal effectiveness. Translation? The quality of your output is only as good as your ability to write really clear instructions for an AI that's interpreting your instructions with another AI.

It's AI all the way down.

What You Should Actually Do

Don't wait for this to show up in your account and figure it out later. Start thinking now about how you'd define your brand voice in a way that an algorithm can understand.

Not "professional." That's vague. Try "authoritative without being stuffy, like a knowledgeable colleague explaining something important."

Not "friendly." Try "conversational but never casual to the point of unprofessional—we're approachable experts, not your buddy."

Include 3-5 example sentences from your best-performing ads, website copy, or marketing materials. The AI analyzes linguistic patterns and replicates them. Give it good examples, get better output. Give it generic examples, get generic output.

Also—and this is critical—you need to monitor your ad content for accuracy once this is turned on. Text Guidelines might steer the AI, but it doesn't replace human oversight. Not yet, anyway.

The Bigger Picture Nobody's Discussing

This feature is rolling out right now, mid-campaign season for most advertisers. It's appearing in some accounts already, with full availability expected soon this fall.

But here's what I'm watching: Google wouldn't build elaborate brand safety controls for AI-generated ad copy unless they were planning to generate a lot more AI ad copy. This isn't the endgame. This is infrastructure for what comes next.

The AI's getting more autonomous. The campaigns are getting more automated. And now they're giving you the tools to set boundaries before they scale it even further.

Smart move on Google's part. Whether it's enough? We're about to find out.

For now, Text Guidelines give brands a new lever to shape how Google's AI writes for them—tightening control without slowing down automation. That's valuable. Just don't confuse "more control" with "total control."

Those are very different things.

The Bottom Line

If you're running Performance Max or AI Max campaigns, you need to pay attention to this. Not because it's a magic fix, but because it's the best control mechanism Google's offered yet for keeping AI-generated copy on-brand.

Set it up right, and you reduce the risk of your AI saying something that makes your legal team send urgent emails. Set it up wrong—or not at all—and you're basically hoping the algorithm reads your mind.

I know which option I'd choose.

The feature's rolling out now. If you don't see it in your account yet, you will soon. Start drafting those brand voice guidelines today, because once this goes live, you'll want them ready.

And maybe—just maybe—we can all stop holding our breath every time we check what the AI wrote this time.