Google Ads has started pulling videos into Performance Max campaigns on its own, taking them from your landing page, your social profiles, and your linked YouTube channel. The setting is called Sourced videos, and Google's own help documentation says it is enabled by default for all new campaigns. Here is where to find it and how to decide whether to leave it on.
What Actually Changed
A new toggle appeared in the asset optimization section of Performance Max campaigns, labeled New, reading "Use videos from other channels." When it is switched on, Google's AI looks through sources you have approved and adds relevant videos to your asset groups without you uploading anything.
Up to 10 crawled videos can be added to a single asset group. Google draws them from three places: social media platforms, the landing page your campaign points to, and the YouTube channel linked to your account. You approve those sources from your video portfolio.
The line that matters most comes straight from Google's help document. It says sourced videos are enabled by default for all new campaigns. That is the whole story in one sentence. If you build a new Performance Max campaign today and change nothing, Google can go find video and run it.
How It Surfaced
This was not announced. Reva Minkoff spotted the toggle in an account and posted about it on LinkedIn. A couple of days before that, Hana Kobzová caught the change in Google's help documentation and summed it up plainly, writing that the change no longer requires advertisers to opt in manually.
Search Engine Roundtable also reported that the setting may have been switched on automatically for some existing campaigns during a recent platform update. That part is worth checking rather than assuming. If you have older campaigns running, do not take it on faith that they were left alone.
Keep in mind, there is no official Google blog post behind this. The behavior is documented in Google's help pages, which is as close to confirmation as this one gets right now.
Why This Is Different From Other Automation
Plenty of Google Ads automation adjusts how your assets get combined. This one adds assets you never made a decision about.
A video on your landing page might be a product demo from two years ago. Your YouTube channel might hold a webinar recording, a company culture clip, or something a former employee uploaded. Your social profiles might have a short that performed well for an entirely different reason than selling. None of that was created as an ad, and now any of it can run as one.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is assuming that more assets in an asset group automatically means better performance. More assets means more coverage. It does not mean the right message. A video that confuses someone about what you sell costs you more than a missing video does.
What To Do This Week
- Open your Performance Max campaigns and find the setting. Look in the asset optimization section for the Sourced videos toggle and note whether it is on for each campaign, new and old.
- Check your video portfolio. See which sources are approved. If your YouTube channel is linked, assume everything public on it is in scope.
- Watch what actually got added. Review the videos sitting in your asset groups now and ask whether you would have chosen them yourself.
- Decide per campaign, not globally. A brand awareness campaign and a lead generation campaign do not deserve the same answer.
I would leave it off on anything where the creative has been deliberately built, and I would consider testing it on campaigns that are genuinely short on video. The good news? It is a campaign level setting, so you can run it both ways and compare.
The Reporting Problem
The harder issue is measurement. Performance Max already makes it difficult to see which asset drove which result, and adding videos you did not choose makes that worse. If performance shifts after this lands, you will have a hard time proving the videos caused it.
That is why noting the date you find the toggle is worth the two minutes. Write it down, then compare the weeks on either side. Working through your Performance Max setup is a lot easier when you know which changes were yours.
Question to Answer:
Do you know whether Sourced videos is turned on in each of your Performance Max campaigns right now, and can you name every video Google has added to them?
In Summary
Google Ads can now add videos to your Performance Max campaigns automatically, sourced from your landing page, your social accounts, and your linked YouTube channel, and Google's help documentation says it is on by default for new campaigns. Nobody announced it, and it may have been enabled on some existing campaigns too.
Go look at the toggle before you decide anything. Then check which videos are already sitting in your asset groups, because that tells you more than the setting does. If you are still getting your bearings in Google Ads, start by understanding what each asset in a campaign is actually doing.
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