If you run one Google Ads campaign for English and another for Spanish, that language setting has been doing more than filtering languages. It has been an audience wall, a budget wall, and the reason your two messages never bid against each other. In late September it disappears from Search campaigns.
Google confirmed the change in mid-August. Campaign-level language targeting is being removed from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns. For Performance Max, the campaign-level language setting stops applying to ads served on Google Search, though it continues to guide delivery on YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail. Shopping ads inside Performance Max are not affected.
What replaces it
Google will decide which language ad to serve using the language of the ad itself, plus its own signals about which languages a user understands. Those signals go well beyond interface language: the language of the query, account settings and other preferences all feed in.
The practical consequence is that someone whose browser is set to Spanish but who habitually searches in English could receive either version of your ad. Where several eligible campaigns exist, Google says AI-based ad group prioritization picks the most relevant candidate at auction time, which is the same pattern behind the automated recommendations now appearing across Google Ads. Search Engine Land’s report on the language targeting removal has fuller detail on how the matching is meant to work.
The API change most teams will hit first
Anyone creating campaigns programmatically should look at this before September. Google recommends dropping language criteria when creating or updating Search campaigns. Existing criteria can stay but will no longer affect targeting. Attempts to add or update CampaignCriterion.language on a Search campaign will return an OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT error, per Google’s guidance for Google Ads API developers. Performance Max will not throw the same error, because language still matters for its non-Search channels.
If you have a script that builds campaigns from a template, or a feed-driven build running on a schedule, that error shows up as a silent build failure at the worst possible moment. Test it against a sandbox account in early September rather than discovering it in production during a launch.
What to rebuild it with
Three things carry the weight now.
Ad copy language, written without ambiguity. Mixed-language ad copy was always sloppy. It is now a targeting error. A Spanish ad group containing an English call to action or an untranslated product name gives Google a confused signal about who the ad is for.
Landing page language. The destination is a signal too. A Spanish ad pointing at an English page was survivable when the campaign setting did the work. It now actively works against you.
Geography and negative keywords, doing the job the setting used to do. If language targeting was how you separated a Miami Spanish-speaking audience from a national English one, that separation now has to come from location targeting, query terms and creative. It is a coarser instrument and you should expect some bleed.
What can go wrong
The obvious risk is your own campaigns competing with each other. If English and Spanish campaigns previously never met at auction because the language setting kept them apart, both can now be eligible for the same impression. Watch impression share and cost per acquisition on each side separately for the first month, not just account totals, because the aggregate can look flat while one side quietly absorbs the other.
The subtler risk is misreading a dip. Late September sits close enough to Q4 that a drop could be seasonal, competitive, or caused by this change, and afterwards you will not be able to separate them. Export your language-split performance in early September and keep it. A baseline captured before the change is worth more than any analysis attempted after it.
There is also a strong case for doing nothing. If you run a single-language account in a single-language market, this is genuinely irrelevant to you. Google says no action is required for existing campaigns, and for most advertisers that is accurate rather than reassuring boilerplate.
The part worth arguing about
Every removal of this kind arrives framed as simplification, and some of them are. This one takes away a control that was cheap, predictable and frequently used for a purpose other than its stated one, and replaces it with a model whose reasoning you cannot inspect. That trade works out when the model knows more than you do. It gets expensive when your campaign structure was carrying an assumption the model has no way of knowing about.
Before late September, write down what your language settings were actually doing in your account. If the honest answer is “keeping Spanish and English budgets apart”, you need a different mechanism for that, and you have about six weeks to build it.
Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy before making compliance decisions.