Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are Google search ads that use the content of your website, rather than a keyword list, to decide which searches to show for. Google crawls the pages you choose, matches them to relevant searches, writes the headline from the page and sends the click to that page. You write only the descriptions.
How Dynamic Search Ads work
Instead of keywords, a DSA ad group has dynamic ad targets: rules that say which pages are eligible. You can target all pages Google has indexed from your domain, pages in categories Google suggests, pages whose URL or title contains certain words, or a page feed, which is a spreadsheet of exact URLs with optional labels. When a search matches the content of one of those pages, Google builds an ad:
- the headline is generated from the page and the search;
- the landing page is the matched page, and the display URL shows its domain;
- the descriptions are the ones you wrote, so they need to work for every page in the ad group.
Because nobody chose the search terms in advance, DSA is mainly a way to catch searches your keyword campaigns miss. Every search it matches appears in the search terms report, which makes it a useful source of new keyword ideas.
At the time of writing (October 2026), Google has been folding DSA into AI Max for Search, which combines keywordless matching with automatically generated text and final URL expansion inside ordinary search campaigns. Some accounts can still create standalone DSA ad groups and some have been upgraded, so check what your account offers before planning around either.
Why it matters for a UK business
DSA suits sites with many well-written pages that would be tedious to cover with keywords: a builders’ merchant with thousands of product pages, a holiday cottage company with a page for every property, or a large firm of solicitors with pages on dozens of legal topics. It finds long, specific searches such as “oak sleepers delivered Sheffield” that nobody would think to add as keywords.
It suits small or thin sites badly. If your pages say little, Google has little to match, and the headlines it writes will be vague. It is also risky on sites with pages you would never pay to promote: job adverts, old news stories, out-of-stock products, or an archive of blog posts on loosely related topics.
Common mistakes
- Targeting all webpages and letting careers, terms and blog pages attract paid clicks.
- Running DSA alongside keyword campaigns without negatives, so the two compete for the same searches.
- Writing descriptions that only fit one product, then showing them against every page.
- Never reading the search terms report, which is where most of DSA’s value lies.
- Pointing DSA at pages with no clear call to action or price, then blaming the format for poor conversion rates.
How to act on it
- Target specific sections or a page feed rather than the whole site, and add exclusions for pages that should never receive paid traffic.
- Add your best-performing keywords as negative keywords in the DSA campaign, so keyword campaigns keep the searches you already target.
- Review search terms weekly at first, move the strong ones into keyword ad groups, and exclude the poor ones.
- Improve the titles and opening copy of target pages, since Google uses them to write the headlines.
Setting up keywordless coverage that adds searches rather than duplicating them is part of the Google search ads management I offer.