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You’re not wrong about any of this and honestly the PMax brand cannibalization point is the one that doesn’t get called out enough. I’ve seen agencies present PMax ROAS numbers to clients like they discovered some magic formula when half that revenue was going to come in anyway through branded organic or direct. Attributing existing customers to a PMax campaign isn’t performance, it’s accounting fiction.
The broad match thing has gotten noticeably worse too. I run some phrase but mostly exact match only on new campaigns specifically because I don’t trust google’s interpretation of “close variant” anymore, let alone broad match. Even exact match picks up stuff now that isn’t really exact. I check search terms reports weekly and the amount of irrelevant garbage that sneaks through is wild. I had a campaign targeting keyword research services matching to searches for “key west resorts” because apparently google decided those were close enough.
The LSA business search feature being on by default is peak google. Charging you for leads from people who searched your actual business name and were going to find you anyway. That’s not lead generation that’s a toll booth on your own brand. And they buried the toggle for it so most business owners don’t even know it’s happening.
The incentive structure is the core problem. Google’s revenue depends on you spending more, not on you spending better. Every “recommendation” in the platform, every default setting, every new automation feature is designed to expand your spend footprint not improve your efficiency. Once you internalize that, you stop trusting the platform’s suggestions and start treating every default as something you need to actively opt out of.
