• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, August 18, 2025

Google announced significant changes to language targeting settings in Google Ads search campaigns.

"By the end of 2025, the language targeting setting will be removed from Google Ads Search campaigns,” Ezra Sackett, director of paid search at the agency Monks, wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will assist Google to detect nuances in language for targeting settings. The changes will take place by the end of 2025.

A fundamental shift is seen in the ways that advertisers control language. The automated system asks marketers to put more trust in AI by eliminating manual language selection requirements, despite expanding targeting capabilities beyond traditional settings.

Search-term language analysis and automation determines long-term user behavior patterns rather than a reliance on single sessions. It will evaluate words and phrases used and identify language patterns.

This is the future of online advertising. Language remains one piece of this, but many others will work similarly. Google hinted at this years ago when it began to move toward automation. 

Not all marketers were happy with the advancement in automation, and many comments that followed Sackett’s post shed light on the change.

Evan Waters, marketing growth advisor and limited partner at digital information management company Yonder, believes Google is taking another powerful tool from advanced marketers.

"It's the wording of this stuff that annoys me," Jyll Saskin Gales, Google Ads coach, wrote in the comments.

She said she did not mind the change, but advertisers get angry when Google tries to frame it as "just trust our AI, you don't need to think about this anymore!"  

Marjorie Vizethann, CEO and co-founder of Alpine Analytix, noted large brands have been setting their languages to “all” for more than 15 years to “scoop up English speakers in other countries,” which makes sense.

“It's not as big of a deal as most people think if you've had the privilege to test it across $2M/month budgets,” Vizethann wrote.

Chris Kostecki, president at Diligent DMC, a digital marketing company, believes the change will open demand to people looking for translations. He has a French language browser where he can look up Spanish words. It can return the French translation.

Some expect hiccups.

“Should be a decent update to reduce granularity for regions with multiple languages,” Robert Grassmann, performance marketing enthusiast, wrote. “Still curious to see if it leads to more queries being lumped into ‘Other’ and thus not being eligible for automated exclusions via scripts or API.”

Matthias Stepancich, growth performance manager at Tesla, and growth and brand at BlueAlpha, believes that completely removing this feature will likely lead to suboptimal outcomes, particularly in multilingual markets.

“Google will for sure rely on pre-auction inference, introducing biases from noisy signals,” he wrote.