Google Ads Is Removing Language Targeting From Search in September 2026 & What It Means for Your EN/AR Campaigns

Back when I wrote the guide on structuring EN/AR campaigns in Google Ads, campaign-level language targeting was one of the levers I told you to use deliberately. That lever is going away. Starting September 2026, Google is removing the language targeting setting from Search campaigns entirely — and from the Search Network portion of Performance Max campaigns too. If you’re running bilingual campaigns for a Dubai or wider UAE audience, this is worth five minutes of your attention before it lands, not after.

What Google Actually Announced

Google confirmed the change will take effect in September 2026, roughly nine months after it was first flagged to advertisers. Here’s the mechanics of it, stripped of the corporate press-release phrasing:

• Search campaigns lose the campaign-level language targeting setting outright. Instead, ads will automatically match based on the language of the ad itself — Google’s systems read your ad copy and serve it to the language audience it’s actually written for.
• Performance Max campaigns keep their language setting for YouTube, Display, Discover, and Gmail placements. But the Search Network portion of a PMax campaign starts behaving exactly like a standard Search campaign — language targeting there is gone too.
• Shopping ads inside Performance Max aren’t affected at all.
• Google’s stated reason is simplification: the setting was creating redundancy and setup errors, and its ad-matching systems already infer language automatically with what it calls “enhanced AI prioritisation” when an advertiser has ads live in more than one language.

Officially, Google says no action is required. For most single-language advertisers, that’s true. For a Dubai account running genuine EN/AR bilingual campaigns, it’s a little more complicated than “do nothing.”

Why This Actually Matters for a Bilingual Dubai Account

The EN/AR structuring guide on this site made a specific case for separate campaigns partly because campaign-level language targeting gave you a clean, guaranteed control point: this campaign only serves to people whose browser/Google settings say Arabic, this one only to English. That guarantee is what’s disappearing for the Search Network.

What replaces it is ad-language matching — Google infers which audience to show an ad to based on the language the ad itself is written in, not a targeting setting you control directly. In practice, if your Arabic ad copy is genuinely Arabic and your English ad copy is genuinely English, the matching should land in roughly the same place it does today. The risk sits in the edge cases: mixed-language ad copy (a common pattern in UAE creative — an English headline with an Arabic description line, or vice versa), transliterated Arabic written in Latin script, and campaigns where the same ad group currently holds both English and Arabic assets relying on the campaign-level setting to keep them separated.

That’s not a reason to panic before September arrives. Look at your account structure now, before you find out how the matching behaves by watching your own numbers move.

What to Check Before the Change Lands

Audit your ad group language purity. Open every Search campaign currently relying on a language targeting setting and check whether the ads inside each ad group are cleanly single-language. Mixed-language responsive search ads — some headlines in English, some in Arabic, sitting in the same ad group — are the accounts most likely to see matching behaviour shift once the campaign-level setting stops doing the separating for you.

Separate ad groups by ad language, not just by campaign. If your current structure leans on the campaign-level setting as the only thing keeping English and Arabic traffic apart, this is the moment to mirror that separation at the ad group level too — pure-English ad groups, pure-Arabic ad groups, no mixing. That gives Google’s ad-language matching a clean signal to work from regardless of what the old setting used to do.

Check your Performance Max Search Network performance specifically. Because PMax keeps language targeting for YouTube, Display, Discover, and Gmail but drops it for Search, a bilingual PMax campaign could see its Search-channel language mix shift while its other channels stay exactly as targeted. Segment your PMax reporting by channel before and after September so you can actually see if this happened, rather than assuming it didn’t.

Don’t rebuild anything speculatively. Google’s own guidance is that no advertiser action is required, and for the majority of accounts — including most single-language Dubai advertisers — that’s accurate. The checklist above is for genuinely bilingual accounts specifically, not a reason to restructure a campaign that’s working.

What I’ll Actually Be Watching For

Nobody — including Google — has published granular before/after data on how ad-language matching performs against explicit campaign-level targeting for a market like the UAE, where mixed-script, mixed-language search behaviour is genuinely common. The safest position for a bilingual Dubai advertiser is: clean up ad group language purity now, keep close reporting granularity through September and October, and be ready to adjust rather than assuming the transition is invisible.

If your account is already cleanly separated by language at the ad group level — which is what the original EN/AR structuring guide recommended in the first place — this change should be close to a non-event for you. If it isn’t, September is a deadline worth taking seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions

Keep Your Bilingual Campaigns Performing Through the Transition

Platform changes like this are exactly why a managed Google Ads account gets checked against release notes on a schedule, not discovered by accident when performance shifts. If you’d rather have someone watching your account structure through September than find out the hard way, a free campaign audit will tell you exactly where your account stands against this change today.

Book your free Google Ads consultation at as86.pro — bilingual service in English and Arabic across all UAE markets.

Related reading:

• EN & AR in Google Ads: Separate Campaigns vs Ad Groups—and Broad vs Phrase Match (Dubai, 2025)
• RSA Search Term Categories Dubai 2026: Cut Wasted PPC Spend in UAE
• SKAG vs STAG: Which Google Ads Strategy Wins in Dubai 2026?