SEO SOP: Control Which Pages Google Sends Your Paid Clicks To

Google’s AI Max reads the intent behind a query, writes the ad, and then picks which page on your own site the paid click lands on. That last part moves site quality out of the SEO backlog and into the paid media account, and it has a date on it. Lisa Raehsler, founder and principal SEM strategist at Big Click Co, laid out what is already live and what becomes mandatory on Unscripted SEO with Jeremy Rivera. This SOP is the audit-and-exclusion pass to run before the window closes.

Objective

Produce a written, maintained decision about every page on your site that could receive a paid click: which pages are fair game, which are excluded, and which campaigns opt out of automatic landing-page selection altogether. Get it entered in the account before the mandatory rollout, not after. Budget a day for the page inventory and the sort, plus an hour in the account to enter the exclusions and lock the final URLs that must not move.

Key Steps

1. Put the two dates on the calendar before anything else. This is not a change you can watch and react to, because part of it already happened. Raehsler, on the day of the interview: “Some of the features just went live actually today, where they were flipping over some of these older features like dynamic ads into this AI Max capability. So people had to go and opt out of it if they don’t want to do it. Right now people are able to opt out of it.” The second date is the one that removes the choice: “They’re making a bigger change that they’re rolling out in February that’s going to be including a lot more of these features, where some of them will be mandatory.” Everything below has to land inside that window.
2. Run Google’s own extraction on your site and read it as a diagnostic. In the Google Ads interface, start a campaign the new way, pasting only your site URL, and let it generate the keywords and the ad copy. Then read what came back. Generic keywords and generic ad copy are a verdict on your pages, not on the tool. Raehsler ran exactly this: “I actually did this today in the web interface, and I can’t even explain the experience. It was frustrating for me to know what they were doing wrong… the keywords that they suggested were more generic. The ad copy was definitely more generic.” (inferred: she performed the action and reported the reading. Treating it as a standing audit method is our framing, not her prescription.) Do not launch the campaign just to run the test.
3. Inventory every page that could plausibly receive a paid click. Crawl the site and list the URLs a commercial query could be matched to. This is the whole indexed surface, not the handful of pages your campaigns currently point at, because the engine is choosing off your site rather than off your ad group. Anything a machine can reach is a candidate.
4. Sort that inventory into allowed and excluded, and write down why. The pages that would waste a click go on the exclusion side. Raehsler’s own examples were the obvious ones: “You do have the ability to uncheck this box to opt out of it. And there are some other controls in there that you can set and say, avoid these pages. So avoid, I don’t know, the privacy page, or maybe the about us page.” She was equally direct that this is human work the automation quietly hands back to you: “You would really need to have a strategy as to what you would tell it to exclude. So that involves a human sitting down and thinking through that in order to be able to enter it in there. So now the human’s entering those exclusions in.”
5. Flag every destination that is not a normal indexed page on your site. Three cases came up on the episode and all three break under automatic selection: a third-party landing page builder, a deliberately unindexed PPC-only page, and several priced or seasonal variants of the same offer. Jeremy Rivera put the first and third to her from his own campaigns. Her answer to the third-party tool was unambiguous: “If you were using that kind of tool, you would need to opt out of the automatic landing pages for sure.” On the priced variants: “You can do it, but you will have to manually override. You’re gonna have to manually override all of that.”
6. Enter the exclusions and lock the final URLs in the account. Uncheck automatic landing pages on the campaigns from step 5, and enter the page exclusions from step 4 on the ones that stay automatic. Note that these are separate controls: you can keep the ad-writing automation and still pin the destination. Raehsler on where the line sits: “Are you okay with it writing the ads, but you want it to go to this exact landing page? That’s possible to do.”
7. Triage the rest of the AI Max feature list the same way. Landing pages are the loudest feature, not the only one. Go through the full list and sort each capability into fine as-is, worth an experiment, needs a human hand on it, or opt out. Raehsler maintains this as a document: “I have a huge spreadsheet that actually shows what all of the features are, what you can opt out of, and different types of controls that are involved.” Her recommendation for the coming months is exactly this sort: “Advertisers should be coming up with a plan to look at the different features that are involved and see which ones they are cool with, which ones they’re good to go with, ones that they want to experiment with, and then also the changes that need a lot more human interaction, a human touch, like these landing pages.”
8. Keep the exclusion list as a living document and re-check it after site changes. A page published next month inherits no exclusion, so a list entered once and forgotten degrades every time the site grows. Put it on the same review cadence as the campaigns themselves. (inferred: Raehsler stressed that a human has to think the exclusions through, but did not prescribe a review cadence.)

Cautionary Notes

• Doing nothing is a decision, and Google makes it for you. Raehsler was blunt about the wait-and-see option: “You can certainly click the button or just wait and see what Google does, because they’re gonna make things mandatory if you don’t do anything. So you can do that. You can sit back and just hope that the results come out.” Her actual advice is the shorter line: “You definitely don’t want to do nothing.”
• Automatic landing pages genuinely work for some businesses. This is not a blanket opt-out recommendation. Her read: it is “good if you’re an e-commerce company with a really good website and really clear pages that’s SEO optimized”, and she cited movie and theater sites as another case where it works well. If sending a query to the right product or category page is the outcome you want anyway, let it.
• The businesses it hurts most are the ones least equipped to notice. “It’s really bad if you’re a company that doesn’t have a lot of resources and don’t have a great site to begin with, like these people that are using it to get up and running quickly.” B2B was the category she named specifically as often not applicable.
• AI Max is search only. “This AI Max feature engine is only applicable to search ads. Only in the search engine, where it’s replacing the traditional keyword search.” Do not audit your Shopping, display or Local Service Ads setup against this SOP. Separately worth knowing: LSAs are being migrated out of their own separate login and into Google Ads.
• Manual override is not free. If you run priced variants, the override is per campaign and ongoing, and it is labor you are taking back on permanently. Scope that cost before you decide the variants are worth keeping.
• Fixing the exclusion list does not fix the pages. Excluding a weak page stops it receiving paid clicks. It does not make the page that should have received them any clearer. Step 2 tells you which is which.

Tips for Efficiency

• Start the exclusion list with the pages that convert nothing anywhere: privacy, terms, careers, about us, author archives, thin tag pages. That is most of the list in twenty minutes.
• Do the audit as one pass with the SEO team rather than two passes in two departments. Raehsler agreed the same work cuts both ways: “Increasing the optimization on the pages can only help… it would be great for incorporating more problem solution type of language on the pages.”
• Keep the exclusions in a shared document that mirrors the account, not only in the account. Whoever inherits the campaign needs the reasoning, not just the setting.
• Re-run the step 2 extraction quarterly. It is free, it takes minutes, and every wrong answer it gives you is a page-clarity bug with a URL attached.
• Handle the third-party and unindexed landing pages first. Those break loudly and immediately, where an exclusion oversight on a blog post only leaks budget quietly.

Why this one matters

Paid search has spent twenty years as a channel where the advertiser chose the destination. That was the part you controlled even when you controlled nothing else about the auction. Raehsler’s framing of the change is not outrage, it is recognition:

“I think it’s another Tuesday of them making decisions and trying to take control away from advertisers.”

What is different this time is where the consequence lands. When Google picks the page, a thin about-us page is no longer an SEO problem somebody will get to next quarter. It is a paid media problem with a cost per click attached to it, on a channel that already has a budget and an owner. That is the actual opening here, and it is why the exclusion list is worth doing properly rather than defensively.

“You definitely don’t want to do nothing.”

Sources & Relevant Episodes

• Lisa Raehsler, Big Click Co – the play is hers. As founder and principal SEM strategist she runs paid search and paid social, and she framed AI Max not as a keyword change but as a destination change: the engine reads the intent, writes the ad, and picks the landing page, which is why the exclusion strategy is the human work that survives. She is also a VIP contributor at Search Engine Journal and hosts AI Ads & Beyond. Full interview: Another Tuesday of Google Taking Control: Lisa Raehsler on AI Max.
• Listen: AI Max: Now Google Picks Your Landing Page on Unscripted SEO. Watch: the full episode on YouTube. Read: AI Max: Now Google Picks Your Landing Page on Substack.
• More from Lisa: bigclickco.com · her column at Search Engine Journal.
• Her first appearance on the show: Lisa Raehsler on PPC, AI Overviews and remarketing.
• Related reading: SEO SOP: Validate Keywords With Three Weeks of Google Ads, the other direction of the same SEO and paid handshake, and SEO SOP: Validate the Not-Indexed Bucket, which is where you find the deliberately unindexed pages step 5 asks about.
• Part of the SEO SOP library.