Performance Max Brand Exclusions Setup (2026 Guide)

Performance Max brand exclusions are the format’s most important guardrail, and most accounts have them set up wrong or not at all. The feature went generally available in late 2023, expanded for retailer campaigns in August 2025, and Google began upgrading Search brand exclusions into AI Max on May 27, 2025 (a change that does not impact PMax). We’ve audited Performance Max accounts spending $500,000 per month with no Performance Max brand exclusions configured, watching Google bid against the brand’s own Search campaign at CPCs three times higher. The leak typically runs 10 to 25% of campaign budget. This guide walks through the current 2026 setup workflow, the brand list management pattern, the audience exclusion controls that pair with brand settings, and the competitor exclusion tactics we use across Hustle Marketers’ ecommerce client roster.

What are Performance Max brand exclusions?

The mechanism Google actually uses

Performance Max brand exclusions tell Google “don’t serve this campaign on queries that mention these specific brands.” Performance Max brand exclusions work at two levels: your own brand (which you exclude to prevent cannibalization of your branded Search campaign) and competitor brands (which you exclude to keep PMax focused on prospecting).

The matching is entity-based, not text-based. Google maintains a registry of recognized brands, and when you select a brand from this registry, the exclusion catches queries that contain the brand name plus its known misspellings, alternate names, and product line names. If the brand isn’t in the registry, you can’t exclude it through this feature, and you’ll need to use account-level negative keywords as a backup (we cover that in our PMax negative keywords guide).

What changed in 2025 for brand exclusions

Three meaningful updates landed in 2025. In August 2025, Google added brand exclusions specifically for retailer campaigns (Shopping ad campaigns running through PMax), expanding the coverage beyond standard text ads. On May 27, 2025, Google began migrating Search campaign brand exclusions into the new AI Max settings panel. The AI Max migration does not impact Performance Max campaigns. PMax brand exclusions continue to function exactly as they did before. The migration also doubled the search theme limits for PMax, which indirectly improves brand-related signal quality.

How do you set up brand exclusions in Performance Max?

The current 2026 path

Current path inside each PMax campaign:

1. Open your Performance Max campaign
2. Click “Campaign settings” in the left navigation
3. Scroll to “Additional settings” near the bottom
4. Click “Brand exclusions”
5. Select an existing brand list or click “Create new brand list”
6. Save and apply

For account-wide brand exclusion (recommended for own-brand cannibalization prevention), you’ll want to set this up via shared library so it applies to every PMax campaign in the account. Path: Tools → Shared library → Brand lists → Create new list.

The brand list management pattern

We maintain three brand lists for most ecommerce accounts:

Own brand list. Contains your company name as recognized by Google, plus any sub-brand or product line names. Applied to every PMax campaign in the account to prevent branded query cannibalization.

Direct competitor list. Contains 5 to 15 named competitors whose brand queries you don’t want PMax bidding on. Applied to every PMax campaign.

Watch list. Contains potential competitors you’re monitoring but haven’t committed to excluding yet. We review this monthly and promote brands to the direct competitor list when we see PMax burning budget on their queries.

Why should you exclude your own brand from Performance Max?

The cannibalization math

Without Performance Max brand exclusions, PMax will bid on your own branded queries. This sounds fine in theory (a conversion is a conversion), but the math doesn’t work in your favor:

Branded Search queries convert at 12 to 20% on average. PMax pays 2 to 4x higher CPCs than Search campaigns for the same impression. Conversion attribution credits PMax for the branded purchase because PMax served the ad, even though a dedicated branded Search campaign would have served the same person at a lower CPC.

The net effect: your branded Search campaign loses impression share, your branded CPA quietly doubles, and your blended ROAS reports look fine because PMax shows a high ROAS on cheap branded conversions. Reporting hides the leak.

How to prove the leak in your account

After setting up your Performance Max brand exclusions, pull a query-level report from your branded Search campaign for the last 90 days. Compare impression share trend before and after PMax launched. If impression share dropped 15 to 30 points without budget cuts on Search, PMax is eating your branded traffic. Set up own-brand exclusions and watch branded Search impression share recover within two weeks. We ran this exact recovery playbook for Drought Secret’s 9+ ROAS skincare campaign and a UK Shopify hair brand that hit 15.25x ROAS, where separating branded protection from prospecting was the single biggest contributor to the final ROAS lift.

We’ve documented this pattern across multiple client audits. The most extreme case: an ecommerce client whose branded Search impression share dropped from 78% to 41% after PMax launch, while branded conversions on PMax climbed correspondingly. Net branded conversions stayed flat. The only change was who got credit and how much each conversion cost.

Can you exclude brand from Search text ads only in Performance Max?

The granular control that landed in 2025

By default, brand exclusions in PMax apply across all inventory channels. But Google now lets you scope brand exclusions to Search text ads only while keeping branded Shopping ads active. This matters for ecommerce because branded Shopping ads convert at high rates with low CPCs, while branded text ads often duplicate effort from your dedicated branded Search campaign.

The use case: you run a separate branded Search campaign with manually written ad copy, but you want PMax to keep serving Shopping ads on branded queries because those Shopping placements are uniquely valuable (showing your products with images and prices to people already searching for your brand). Set up the brand exclusion with the “Search text ads only” scope and you get both behaviors.

Path: inside the brand list settings, look for the “Apply to” dropdown. Select “Search text ads only” instead of the default “All channels.”

Which competitor brands should you exclude from Performance Max?

The decision framework

Not every competitor deserves exclusion. Some competitor queries actually convert well for your business because the searcher is in research mode and may switch. Here’s the framework we use:

Exclude competitor brands where you’ve never converted from their query traffic on your Search campaigns. Easy decision.

Test before excluding competitor brands where you have a clear positioning differential (“X vs Y” queries). Sometimes these convert at 4 to 8% because the searcher is comparing options. Pulling out of these can cost incremental revenue.

Always exclude competitor brands that are larger and more established than yours. You’ll pay premium CPCs to outrank their brand on their own term, and conversion rates rarely justify the cost.

Always exclude direct enemy brands where the competitive dynamic is hostile (industries with aggressive switching incentives, competitive ad bans, or trademark disputes).

How to source the right competitor list

Three sources we pull from for competitor lists:

SEMrush or Ahrefs competitor overlap report. Filter for brands where you share 30%+ keyword overlap and they have stronger domain authority.

Google Ads auction insights report. Shows you which advertisers appear alongside you in the same auctions. Pull this monthly and add new entrants to your watch list.

Customer interview data. Ask your sales team or check support tickets for “we considered [X] before choosing you” mentions. These are the brands actively competing for your customer pool.

How do audience exclusions pair with brand exclusions in 2026?

The 2026 audience exclusion playbook

Brand exclusions handle query-level filtering. Audience exclusions handle who PMax serves to regardless of query. The two work together to seal the cannibalization leak completely.

The highest-impact audience exclusion for ecommerce: exclude recent purchasers (people who bought in the last 30 to 60 days) from prospecting PMax campaigns. Without this, PMax will keep serving to recent customers because they’re high-converting, which means you’re paying to re-acquire customers who would have come back organically.

Setup path: Tools → Audience manager → Create customer match audience using your last-30-day purchaser list. Then inside each PMax campaign, navigate to Campaign settings → Audience exclusions and add the customer match audience.

Other useful audience exclusions

Beyond recent purchasers, accounts should consider excluding:

Existing email subscribers who haven’t converted in 90+ days (they’re seeing your remarketing already, and PMax adds incremental cost without incremental conversions).

Cart abandoners older than 14 days (after two weeks of seeing remarketing, additional ad pressure rarely converts them).

Job applicants and employees if you’ve uploaded a candidate list (irrelevant traffic).

Audience exclusions are also where 2026’s expanded demographic exclusions live. You can now exclude specific age brackets (18-24, 65+) and device types directly from the standard campaign settings interface, which is useful for B2B SaaS lead gen where age and device combinations are predictive of poor conversion.

What’s the difference between brand exclusions and negative keywords for Performance Max?

The use case split

Brand exclusions are surgical. They match recognized brand entities including their variations and misspellings, which is more precise than text-based matching. They’re the right tool for blocking specific company names.

Negative keywords are broader. They block by text match, with the standard exact, phrase, and broad modifiers. They’re the right tool for blocking everything that isn’t a brand: generic terms, intent modifiers, geographic exclusions.

Rule of thumb: if the thing you’re trying to block is a company name, use brand exclusions. If it’s a category, descriptor, or intent modifier, use negative keywords. Use both together for full coverage.

When brand exclusions don’t catch a competitor

If a competitor brand isn’t in Google’s brand registry yet (common for newer DTC brands, regional businesses, or specialty B2B companies), brand exclusions won’t work. The exclusion will save but won’t actually block the queries because there’s no entity to match against.

The workaround is dual-coverage: try brand exclusion first, then add the brand name as an exact match negative keyword at the campaign level (now possible with 10,000 negative keywords per campaign as of March 2025). After 30 days, check if both are active. If the brand exclusion shows zero blocked impressions but the negative keyword is catching queries, the brand isn’t in the registry. Keep the negative keyword and remove the exclusion.

How do you check if brand exclusions are working?

The verification report

Inside your PMax campaign, navigate to Insights and reports → “Search terms.” You’ll see actual queries that triggered your ads (this is the full Search Terms Report that launched in 2025). Brand-related queries should appear with low or zero impressions if your exclusions are working.

For deeper diagnostics, also check the Search Themes Report. It groups query categories, and brand-related themes should drop dramatically after exclusion setup.

What you’re looking for: any brand from your exclusion list showing meaningful impression or click volume. If you see them, the exclusion isn’t catching that brand and you need the negative keyword backup.

The brand exclusion audit cadence

We audit brand exclusions monthly across managed accounts. The audit covers:

Confirm own-brand exclusion is still active (we’ve seen these get removed accidentally during campaign edits).

Pull search terms report for the last 30 days, filter for brand-related queries, confirm impression volume stays under 1% of total.

Review auction insights and add any new competitor brands that appeared as overlap entrants.

Update brand exclusion lists if Google has added new brands you wanted to block but couldn’t before (their registry expands monthly).

Confirm audience exclusions for recent purchasers and other relevant lists are still applied.

How do brand exclusions affect Performance Max performance?

The short-term impact

When you first add own-brand exclusions to a PMax campaign that’s been running without them, you’ll see PMax’s reported ROAS drop and CPA rise. This isn’t a real performance decline. It’s PMax losing access to the cheap branded conversions it was claiming. Your branded Search campaign will pick those up at lower CPC, and your blended account ROAS will improve over 14 to 21 days.

The decline can look alarming. PMax campaigns we’ve added own-brand exclusions to have seen reported ROAS drop from 7x to 4x in the first two weeks. The same accounts have seen blended ROAS climb from 3.8x to 5.2x once the dust settled. Reporting trade-off, profit improvement.

The competitor exclusion impact

Competitor exclusions have less dramatic impact. You’ll see a small drop in PMax impression volume and a slight CPA improvement as the campaign refocuses on lower-CPC non-branded queries. The shift typically shows up over 30 days.

For the largest impact, combine brand exclusions with a structured asset group strategy (see our asset group structure guide) and a clean negative keyword list. The three together change PMax behavior more than any individual fix.

Why choose Hustle Marketers for Performance Max brand strategy?

We’ve configured brand exclusions on hundreds of Performance Max accounts since the feature launched in beta. Founded by Ishant Sharma in 2013, Hustle Marketers has driven over $780M in trackable client revenue across 2500+ brands, with Google Partner status and 591+ Upwork reviews at 99% job success. Our PMax case studies include ArmorGarage at 15x ROAS, P-REX Hobby at 9x ROAS, and a pet accessories brand at $346K revenue and 5.12x ROAS, all accounts where brand exclusion setup contributed meaningfully to blended ROAS lift. If your PMax campaign is running without brand exclusions or you’re seeing your branded Search impression share drop, we offer a free 30-minute account walkthrough. Get in touch and we’ll show you exactly what to fix first.

Conclusion

Performance Max brand exclusions are the easiest fix in Performance Max with the biggest profit impact. The own-brand Performance Max brand exclusions alone typically recover 10 to 25% of branded conversion margin within three weeks. Competitor exclusions cleanly redirect spend toward prospecting, which is what PMax is actually built to do. Audience exclusions (especially excluding recent purchasers) seal the rest of the leak. The setup is 30 minutes if you have your brand list ready. The audit is 30 minutes per month. If you’ve been running PMax for six months without configuring brand exclusions, you’ve likely left enough on the table to fund a quarter of agency fees. Set up your Performance Max brand exclusions this week, rerun the math next month, and run through the full complete PMax setup checklist while you’re in there to catch anything else worth fixing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are brand exclusions available on all Performance Max campaigns?

Yes. Brand exclusions became generally available to all Google Ads accounts running PMax in late 2023. Retailer-specific brand exclusions expanded in August 2025.

Did the May 2025 AI Max migration affect Performance Max brand exclusions?

No. The AI Max migration only applies to Search campaign brand exclusions. PMax brand exclusions continue to function exactly as they did before the change.

Can I exclude a brand that isn’t in Google’s brand registry?

Not via brand exclusions. You’ll need to use campaign-level negative keywords (up to 10,000 per campaign since March 2025) as a workaround until Google adds the brand to its registry.

Will brand exclusions reduce my Performance Max conversion volume?

For excluded own-brand queries, yes. Your branded Search campaign should capture those conversions instead. Blended account volume usually stays flat or improves.

How many brands can I exclude in one Performance Max campaign?

Up to 1,000 brands per list. Most accounts only need 10 to 30 brand exclusions covering own-brand and direct competitors.

Do brand exclusions work across all PMax inventory like YouTube and Discover?

Yes by default. As of 2025, you can also scope brand exclusions to Search text ads only while keeping branded Shopping ads active.

Can I exclude brands at the asset group level instead of campaign level?

No. Brand exclusions only work at the campaign level or account level via shared library. Asset groups inherit exclusions from the parent campaign.

How long does it take for brand exclusions to take effect?

Within 24 to 48 hours, you should see brand query impressions drop. Full performance stabilization on blended ROAS takes 14 to 21 days.

Can I exclude recent purchasers from Performance Max campaigns?

Yes, using audience exclusions and a Customer Match list. Upload your last-30-day purchaser list as a Customer Match audience and exclude it at the campaign level.

What is the difference between brand exclusions and audience exclusions?

Brand exclusions block queries mentioning specific brands. Audience exclusions block specific people from seeing ads (recent purchasers, employees, candidates). Both work together for full coverage.