Every Google Ads account keeps a log of every change that's ever been made to it. Every keyword added, every bid adjusted, every ad written, every setting toggled. It records who made the change, when they made it, and whether it was a human or an automated system. Google stores two years of this data. It's called the change history, and it's the single fastest way to find out whether your agency is actually doing anything.
I bring this up because "managed" is a word that gets used loosely in this industry. You’re paying an agency $2,000 or $3,000 a month to manage your Google Ads account, and you assume that means someone is in there regularly, making decisions, testing things, watching what’s happening. But the change history doesn’t lie. It shows you exactly what’s been done, how often, and by whom. And on a lot of accounts we take over, what it shows is that nobody has touched the thing in months.
This post is part of our 12-point Google Ads audit. We check account settings and management activity as step 5 because by this point we’ve already looked at the data (conversion tracking, campaign performance, search terms, Quality Score), and now we’re looking at the humans behind it.
What Active Management Actually Looks Like
Before I show you what neglect looks like, it helps to know what you should expect to see in a well-managed account. The frequency and type of changes vary depending on account size and budget, but there are patterns that healthy accounts share regardless of industry or spend level.
On a $5,000-$15,000/month account with 3-5 campaigns, you should see activity in the change history every week or two at minimum, and it should be substantive work, not just bid changes. You should see new negative keywords being added after someone reviewed the search terms report, ad copy being updated or tested, bid strategy adjustments based on performance trends, sitelink or callout extensions being refreshed. Occasionally you’ll see structural changes like a new ad group or a campaign restructure when the data supports it.
The type of changes matters as much as the frequency. An agency that logs in once a week to adjust a few bids by 5-10% and nothing else is doing the PPC equivalent of checking the oil without ever driving the car. Bid adjustments are the lowest-effort change you can make, and on accounts running Smart Bidding (which is most accounts in 2026), manual bid adjustments on search campaigns don’t even do anything. The algorithm ignores them. So if the change history is full of bid tweaks on a Max Conversions campaign, that’s activity with zero actual impact being logged to make it look like someone was working.
Active management also means reacting to what the platform does. Google made major changes in 2025 and 2026: RSA headline and description performance data became available for the first time, AI Max for Search started rolling out, Performance Max got expanded brand controls. If your agency hasn’t discussed any of these with you, hasn’t tested anything new, and hasn’t adjusted strategy based on platform changes, they’re running a 2023 playbook in a 2026 environment.
What Autopilot Looks Like
Pull up the change history on an account that’s been neglected and you’ll see one of two patterns. Either the history is almost empty for weeks or months at a time, with nothing but the occasional budget adjustment, or it’s full of changes labeled "Automatic" or "Google Ads system" rather than a person’s email address.
The first pattern is straightforward neglect. Nobody is logging in, nobody is reviewing search terms, nobody is testing new ad copy. The account is running on whatever was set up six months or a year ago, and the agency is collecting a management fee for doing nothing. We’ve taken over accounts where the last human change was four months before the client called us. That’s $40,000 in ad spend with nobody watching what happened to it.
The second pattern is more common and harder to spot because the change history isn’t empty. It’s full of entries. But when you look at who made the changes, it says "Google Ads system" or "Auto-applied recommendation" instead of a person’s name. Google is making the changes, not the agency. The agency may not even know it’s happening, because they turned on auto-apply and walked away.
Auto-Applied Recommendations
Google Ads has a feature that lets it automatically make changes to your account based on its own recommendations. It can add keywords, change your bid strategy, write new ad copy, raise your budget, switch match types, and create entirely new campaign types, all without anyone approving it first. It’s called auto-apply, and on accounts where it’s been turned on and left alone, Google is effectively running the account on your agency’s behalf.
The problem isn’t that every auto-applied recommendation is bad. Some of them are fine. Google catching a broken URL or suggesting a missing extension is useful. The problem is that Google’s recommendations are optimized for Google’s business model, not yours. Google makes money when you spend more. So recommendations like "raise your budget," "switch to broad match," "add Display Network to your Search campaign," and "create a Performance Max campaign" show up constantly regardless of whether they’d actually help your account. If auto-apply is on, those changes happen without anyone evaluating whether they make sense for your business.
Most agencies that leave auto-apply enabled do it for one of two reasons. Either they genuinely don’t know it’s on (because Google enables some categories by default and you have to actively opt out), or they leave it on because it boosts their Optimization Score, which brings us to the next problem.
The Optimization Score Game
Google assigns every account an Optimization Score from 0 to 100%. It looks and feels like a grade. A client sees 72% and thinks their account is getting a C. An agency sees 72% and knows their Google rep is going to call them about it. But it’s not a performance metric. It doesn’t measure whether your campaigns are profitable or your CPA is on target or your phone is ringing. It measures how many of Google’s recommendations you’ve followed.
You can get a 100% Optimization Score by dismissing every single recommendation. Just click "dismiss" on all of them and the score goes to 100. That tells you everything you need to know about what the number actually measures.
It's not evaluating your account's health, it's tracking whether you've engaged with Google's suggestion engine.
The reason agencies care about it is that Google Partner status (the badge on their website) requires maintaining minimum Optimization Scores across their managed accounts. So an agency chasing Partner status has a financial incentive to apply recommendations that boost the score, even if those recommendations aren’t good for your account. "Switch to broad match" might be terrible for a veterinary clinic with a $3,000/month budget, but dismissing it drops the score, and a lower score threatens the agency’s partnership tier.
If your agency has ever sent you a report highlighting your Optimization Score or told you they "improved" it, ask them what specifically changed and whether it improved your actual cost per lead. Those are very different conversations.
The 200 Sitelinks Nobody Wrote
One of the things we see most often on neglected accounts is a bloated asset library full of automatically generated sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets that no human ever created. Google’s system crawls your website and generates these assets on its own. It pulls page titles, navigation labels, product names, and service descriptions and turns them into ad extensions that can show alongside your ads.
On a well-managed account, you’ll see 4-8 sitelinks per campaign that someone deliberately chose because they match the intent of that campaign’s keywords. An ecommerce store’s winter jacket campaign might have sitelinks for "Men’s Jackets," "Women’s Jackets," "Sale Items," and "Free Shipping Over $75." Those were written by a human who understood what someone searching "winter jackets online" would want to click next.
On a neglected account, you’ll see 100, 150, sometimes 200+ sitelinks that Google auto-generated from the website. Links to the privacy policy, the careers page, a blog post from 2019, product pages that aren’t relevant to the campaign they’re attached to. Nobody curated these or checked whether they make sense. They exist because Google’s system created them and nobody turned the feature off or cleaned up the results.
The same thing happens with ad copy itself. Google’s "text customization" feature (formerly called Automatically Created Assets) generates headlines and descriptions using AI based on your landing pages and existing ads. Starting September 2026, campaigns using this feature will automatically be upgraded to AI Max, which expands the AI’s ability to write and serve ad copy without human review. If your agency hasn’t explicitly configured these settings, Google’s AI may be writing your ads for you, and nobody is checking what it’s saying.
How to Check Yours
Go to your Google Ads account. In the left nav, click Campaigns, then Change history. Set the date range to the last 90 days. You’re now looking at every change made to your account over the past three months.
Look at three things:
Who made the changes. Every entry shows a "Made by" column. You should see email addresses that belong to people at your agency. If most entries say "Google Ads system" or "Auto-applied recommendation," those weren’t made by your agency, they were made by Google’s automated system. If there are almost no entries with a human email address over a 90-day window, nobody is actively managing this account regardless of what the monthly report says.
What kind of changes were made. Even scrolling through the list without filtering gives you the picture pretty quickly. A healthy account should show a variety of change types: new keywords, new ads, new negative keywords, campaign settings changes, extension updates. An autopilot account shows the same two or three types repeated, usually "Bid adjustment changed" and "Budget changed" with nothing else. If you want to get specific, you can filter by change type, but the scroll test is usually enough to tell you what’s going on.
How often changes happen. Three months of change history on a managed account should have entries spread across most weeks, not concentrated in bursts. If you see a cluster of changes the week after your monthly report call and then nothing until the next call, you’re getting reactive management at best, where someone scrambles to make a few changes before the next meeting so they have something to talk about. Multi-week gaps with zero activity are the clearest sign that your account has been shelved.
You can also check the auto-apply settings directly. In your Google Ads account, go to the Recommendations page, then look for "Auto-apply" in the upper right. This shows you which recommendation categories Google is allowed to apply without asking. If categories like "Use broad match keywords," "Raise your budgets," or "Use optimized ad rotation" are checked, Google is making those changes automatically. On a properly managed account, all of those should be unchecked except possibly "Remove redundant keywords" and "Fix ad text issues."
What This Tells You About Your Agency
The change history isn’t a gotcha. Some months are quieter than others. A well-built account in a stable market might legitimately need fewer changes in February than it does in January after the holiday rush. Seasonal lulls are real. But "fewer changes" is different from "zero changes," and the presence of human decisions in the log is different from a log full of automated system entries.
What you’re looking for is evidence that someone is thinking about your account. Evidence that search terms are being reviewed and negative keywords added, that ad copy is being tested rather than left on the same rotation for six months, that settings are being adjusted when Google rolls out new features, and that someone is reacting to performance changes rather than just describing them in a monthly report after the fact.
If your agency has never walked you through the change history or shown you what they’ve been doing in the account beyond what’s in the monthly report, ask them to. Pull it up on your next call. A good agency will welcome the transparency. If they get defensive or tell you "that’s not how we report," that tells you something too.
This is one of the 12 steps in our full Google Ads audit process. If you want us to pull your change history and show you what’s actually been happening, request a free audit and we’ll run the full analysis.
