So, imagine: your dashboard looks good, Google Ads shows more conversions and a lower cost per lead. Sounds good, right?
Then sales tells you a different story: half the leads never pick up the phone, some company names don’t exist and some people were looking for something you don’t sell.
Nobody is wrong here, because they count different things. Google counts every form that gets filled in, sales counts the people who turn into a real conversation.
That gap is not new, but since September it can grow faster. Google switched many Search campaigns to AI Max, which shows your ads for more searches. At the same time, agencies are reporting more fake form fills from bots that look like real people. Both make the same old problem bigger: Google finds more of whatever you tell it to count. If you count form fills, you get more form fills.
1. Google finds what you count
Google Ads learns from your conversions. Every time a conversion comes in, Google looks at who clicked, what they searched and when, and goes looking for more people like them.
In many accounts, that conversion is “form submitted” or “call longer than a minute”. To Google, a perfect-fit buyer, a student doing research and a bot all look the same. Each is one conversion. So Google does what it’s asked: it finds more form fills, as cheaply as possible. The cheapest form fills usually come from the people least likely to buy.
AI Max makes this matter more. It shows your ads for searches you never added as keywords, and it can send people to a different page on your site than the one you picked. If Google knows which leads became customers, that extra reach can find you more of them. If it only knows “a form was filled in”, it can now find a lot more of the wrong ones.
Bots add to the problem. We see AI bots filling in forms with realistic names, emails and company details, especially in Performance Max campaigns. Every fake form that counts as a conversion teaches Google to find more traffic like it. And we also see other agencies struggling with this issue.
2. We made this mistake ourselves
One of our clients is a Dutch funeral care provider. Almost every funeral they arrange starts with one phone call: a family calling to say a loved one has passed, and asking them to take care of the funeral.
Our client has nobody to listen back to calls. So we set up Google Ads to count every call of three minutes or longer as a conversion, because a call like that is never shorter. It looked like a sensible rule. But families the client already supports, billing questions and suppliers also talk for three minutes or more. Google got very good at finding long calls, and worse at finding families who needed help.
In spring 2026 the client told us they were thinking about stopping Google Ads. Our reports showed a healthy cost per conversion, but their own numbers showed that a real funeral request cost more than three times as much, well above what they could afford.
So we changed what Google counts. Using the client’s call tracking, we now send only the actual new funeral requests back to Google Ads as conversions.
Together with simpler landing pages and a cleaner account structure, the results from April to August 2026 were:
- More than 60% more funeral requests per month
- More than 40% lower cost per funeral request, now below the client’s own limit
The client didn’t need to do anything extra: no staff labelling calls, no new CRM. And more families could find our client and call them straight away.
Want to know how this would work for your calls? Talk to us.
3. How to fix it in your own account
Write down what a good lead is. Sit sales and marketing at one table and agree on it. For a SaaS company that is usually a qualified demo booked. For a lead gen business it could be a lead that sales accepted, a quote that was sent or a deal that was won. If sales and marketing disagree on this, no campaign setting will fix it.
Send that result back to Google. Your CRM knows which leads became good leads. You can send that information back to Google Ads automatically, so Google learns from real customers instead of form fills. Keep the form fill visible in your reports, but stop telling Google it’s the goal. Google recommends sending this at least once a day. Google’s guidance.
Give results a value. A deal worth €20,000 and a lead that goes nowhere shouldn’t count the same. Even rough values per step, such as €50 for a lead and €500 for a demo, help Google tell them apart.
Stop fake forms at the door. A spam check on the form, a check on email addresses and phone numbers and a rule in the CRM that marks clear spam. Fewer fake leads in your CRM means fewer fake leads counted as wins in Google.
4. Then check what AI Max changed
Once Google knows what a good lead is, the extra reach from AI Max helps it find more of those leads. Until then, check these four things:
- Search terms. Look at the searches that triggered your ads since September. Would a buyer type them, or are they people looking for free tools, jobs or definitions?
- Landing pages. See which pages Google sent people to. Exclude blog posts, career pages and anything that isn’t built to turn a visitor into a lead.
- Ad text. Read what Google wrote for you. Does it still say what you sell, to whom and at what price? AI sounds confident even when it’s wrong. In our own work with AI tools, we’ve seen them make up details on small tasks. That’s why a person reads the copy before it goes live.
- Leads per campaign. Compare good leads per campaign before and after the switch, not just total conversions.
We run these checks continuously.
If the good leads dropped, you can switch off the parts that cause it: matching to extra searches, Google writing your ad text or Google choosing the landing page. Base that decision on the lead numbers from sales.
What to do this week
Take your last (at least) 20 leads from Google Ads. Ask sales which ones were real. Then check which of those 20 Google counted as a conversion.
If the two lists don’t match, start there. Changing bids, budgets or campaign types before you fix this means building on a broken foundation.
That is why we start every account with the foundation: tracking, an agreed definition of a good lead and real results flowing back to Google. We can link part of our fee to results, so a lead that sales can’t use is a problem for us too. See how we connect the full funnel.
Not sure what Google is learning from your account? Book a free strategy call. A senior specialist goes through your Google Ads and Analytics data and tells you what to fix first.
FAQ
Should I turn off AI Max?
Not by default. First check the search terms, landing pages and lead quality since the switch. If good leads dropped, change the settings or switch off the parts that cause it. If they held up, the extra reach may be worth keeping.
How do I know if my leads are bots?
Look for patterns in your CRM: phone numbers that don’t work, email addresses that bounce, company names you can’t find and many forms at odd hours or with almost the same details. Ask sales which leads they never managed to reach.
We don’t have a CRM connection yet. Is it worth setting up?
For most lead gen and SaaS companies spending €5K or more per month on ads, yes. Without it, Google can only learn from form fills. But the funeral care case shows it doesn’t always need a big project: we used the call tracking tool they already used. Even a manual upload of good leads once a week is better than nothing.
My cost per lead went down. Isn’t that good?
Only if the leads are as good as before. Track the cost per good lead or per customer next to the cost per lead. If your cost per lead drops while sales closes fewer deals, each customer has become more expensive.
