If you run Local Services Ads, you will get a notice giving you fourteen days before your account moves. That notice is the only deadline that matters, and there is one thing to do before it expires.
Export your historical reports. They do not transfer.
Everything else in this article is context. That is the action item.
What Google announced
On July 20, 2026, Google announced that Local Services Ads are being folded into the main Google Ads platform as a specialised Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals. Rollout began in August 2026 with a small group of US advertisers, expands through broader US categories across the rest of the year, and reaches non-US accounts and remaining categories through 2027.
The named categories include plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving.
Migration is automatic. You are not being asked to do anything except be ready.
The reassurance that matters most
When contractors hear Performance Max, they reasonably become concerned, because standard Performance Max has a poor reputation among small advertisers. It sprays across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover, bills per click or conversion, and is famously opaque about where the money went.
That is not what is happening here.
This is a specialised pay-per-lead version. Migrated campaigns continue to serve exclusively on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions as before, with no expansion into Display, YouTube, Shopping, or any other inventory.
You still pay only for valid leads such as calls and messages, never for clicks. Keywordless category-plus-area targeting carries over. Your Google Verified badge, your reviews, and your leads all transfer, along with your service categories, service areas, business information, photos, and schedules.
For the customer looking at the search result, nothing changes at all.
What genuinely changes
Five things, and they are operational rather than existential.
The standalone dashboard goes away. Once your account migrates, the separate Local Services Ads interface becomes inaccessible and everything moves into Google Ads alongside any other campaigns you run.
Historical performance reports do not migrate. This is the one with a deadline attached. Anything you have not exported before your account moves is gone.
Manual bidding is retired. The manual maximum cost-per-lead control disappears, replaced by automated bidding. If you have been managing that number deliberately, you are handing it over.
Vertical-level Target CPA becomes a single campaign-level Target CPA. Previously you could set different targets for different service categories. Now there is one number for the campaign.
Weekly budgets become daily budgets, calculated as your weekly figure divided by seven. And BBB callouts in the ad unit are being retired.
What to actually do
Before the notice expires: export everything. Lead history, cost per lead by category, booking rates, monthly totals, anything you have used to make decisions. Pull it into a spreadsheet you control.
That matters beyond nostalgia. Your own historical cost per booked job by service category is the baseline you will need to judge whether the automated bidding is doing better or worse than you were. Without it you have no comparison, and the migration effectively resets your knowledge of your own account.
After migration: watch the daily budget conversion carefully in the first fortnight. A weekly budget divided by seven behaves differently from a weekly budget, particularly in trades where demand clusters on certain days.
Then watch cost per booked job rather than cost per lead, and compare it against the figures you exported. If the automated bidding underperforms your manual settings, that is worth knowing early, and you will only know if you kept the numbers.
The honest read
This is mostly an administrative consolidation dressed in an alarming name. Google is retiring a separate product and folding it into its main platform, which is the sort of thing large platforms do periodically and which usually matters less than the announcement suggests.
The genuine losses are manual bid control, per-vertical targeting, and your reporting history. The first two are real reductions in control for anyone who was using them well. The third is entirely avoidable and will catch a lot of people who did not read the notice.
The genuine non-event is the Performance Max branding. Your ads are not about to appear on YouTube.
So: export your reports, note your current cost per booked job by category, and then carry on. The channel you were using is the channel you will still be using, managed from a different screen.