Starting late September, campaign-level language targeting disappears from Search — and, in a reversal from what Google said last year, Performance Max search placements too. No more manually telling a campaign “target Spanish” or “target French.” Google’s systems decide that on their own from here on, based on ad and landing page language, the search term, and the user’s own language settings.
Where this actually bites:
→ A US business running Spanish-language campaigns for Miami or LA
→ A Canadian brand running French campaigns for Quebec inside a national account
→ Any company chasing expats — Brazilians in Portugal, Indians in the UAE — who keep searching in their home language wherever they’ve landed
That kind of precision came from stacking a location target with a manual language setting. Take the language lever away, and Google’s automatic matching has to do that job instead — with no guarantee it draws the line where you would.
The part worth flagging: language targeting also doubled as a diagnostic tool — the way you’d sanity-check why a campaign was picking up irrelevant-language impressions. That lever is going away too. And this lands about nine months later than Google’s original December 2025 deadline, with a scope that grew to include PMax along the way.
Shopping ads are untouched, PMax still respects language setting s on YouTube, Display, Discover, and Gmail, and Google still won’t translate your ad copy — this was always matching, not translation.
The timeline:
→ August 2025: Google says removal is coming by end of 2025, Search only
→ August 14, 2026: Ginny Marvin confirms the update — PMax added, new date set
→ Late September 2026: goes live, no action required for existing campaigns
Google calls this “not a big shift,” since the setting had become redundant. Fair enough for a single-language, single-market account. Less true if reaching a language community inside a bigger market is part of your job — that’s exactly the fine-tuning this removes.
If your campaigns are built around a specific language audience — diaspora, expats, a bilingual local market — are you testing what automatic matching actually catches before this goes live, or finding out after?
