The LSA to Performance Max Migration: What Dies, What Survives, and What to Do Before Your Wave Hits

The biggest change since LSA launched

Local Services Ads is folding into Performance Max.

This isn't a feature update or a dashboard refresh. It's a platform consolidation. The standalone LSA product you've been managing for years is being absorbed into Google's broader Performance Max system, and when your account migrates, the LSA experience as you know it ends.

We've watched Google reshape LSA plenty of times. Google Guaranteed became Google Verified. Lead disputes gave way to autocrediting. Those were adjustments. This is different in kind. The container itself is changing.

The good news: the core economics survive. The risky news: the transition window is where accounts get hurt, and most businesses don't know their window has a date on it.

The timeline: three waves

Here's the rollout as it currently stands:

• August 2026: US home and storefront services. This wave is live now.
• Late 2026: Service area businesses.
• 2027: Non-US accounts and all remaining categories.

Where does legal land? Google's public page doesn't name the legal vertical explicitly, but based on our read of the rollout and our work inside the LSA ecosystem, we expect legal to migrate in 2027 with the remaining categories. We'll update this brief the moment Google confirms vertical-level dates.

One thing to plan around: expect delays. Google launch timelines slip, and a migration of this magnitude, touching every LSA account in every vertical, is exactly the kind of launch that slips. Treat these dates as earliest-possible, and prepare as if they'll hold. That combination keeps you safe either way.

Delays are a gift if you use them. Every extra month is more time to archive data, fix budget math, and watch what happens to the accounts that migrated before you.

What dies

When your account migrates, these go away:

• LSA dashboard access. The interface you manage everything in today ends at migration.
• Historical reports. Your performance history does not carry over into Performance Max. More on this below, because it's the single most urgent item in this brief.
• Weekly budgets. Budgets auto-convert from weekly to daily.
• Manual bidding. Deprecated.
• Vertical-level target CPA. Deprecated.
• BBB callouts. Deprecated.

There's also a structural change to the Business Profile connection. Core business information, meaning your business name, physical address, and standard hours, will sync one way from Google Business Profile into Google Ads. Targeting controls such as service areas and ad schedules can still be managed independently in Google Ads.

For multi-location businesses and the agencies managing them, this raises the stakes on GBP hygiene. If a franchisee or location manager edits a business name or address in GBP, that change flows straight into the ad account, and significant changes trigger a verification review that can temporarily pause the campaign. Whoever controls GBP now effectively holds a lever on ad delivery, so lock down GBP edit access before your wave, not after.

What survives

The parts that actually define LSA's value are staying:

• Pay-per-lead pricing. Google says you'll continue paying only for valid leads, and the automated lead-credit system remains documented for eligible categories.
• Placements. Where your ads show doesn't change.
• Keywordless targeting. Matching stays based on your services and area, without keyword management.
• The Google Verified badge. Your verification status and badge carry over.

If you strip this migration down to one sentence for a business owner: the product you're buying stays the same, the machine that runs it is being replaced.

The data trap

This is the part that will hurt people, so read it twice.

One important distinction here. Your customer lead history does migrate. Google confirms that contact details, message conversations, and older call recordings transfer into the new Lead Manager in Google Ads. What does not carry over is your performance dataset: spend history, lead volume trends, cost per lead, impressions, and every performance report you've ever pulled.

That performance dataset is exactly what you'll need for pre and post-migration benchmarking, and it lives in a dashboard with a shutdown date attached to your account. If nobody exports it before your wave, it's gone, and there is no recovery path we're aware of.

Why this matters beyond nostalgia:

• Benchmarking. You can't evaluate PMax performance without knowing what LSA performance was.
• Budget defense. When the new system behaves differently in month one, your historical data is your evidence for what normal looks like.
• Seasonality. Home services and legal both run on seasonal patterns. Losing multi-year history means relearning your own business from scratch.

If you do exactly one thing after reading this brief, export your performance reports. This week. Even if your wave is a year out.

What to do now: the readiness checklist

Four items, in order:

• Identify your wave. Home or storefront service in the US, you're in wave one, and it's already moving. Service area business, late 2026. Non-US and remaining categories, including legal by our read, 2027. Google sends the account administrator an email 14 days before your migration date, so make sure the right person is listed. If you're not sure which bucket you fall in, ask your rep or ask us.
• Archive your data. Export full performance history: leads, spend, cost per lead, phone call data, everything the dashboard will give you. Store it somewhere that isn't the dashboard.
• Check the budget math. Weekly budgets convert to daily automatically. A $500 weekly budget doesn't always behave like a $71 daily budget, because daily systems pace differently. Know your converted number before the system sets it for you, and watch spend closely in the first weeks after migration.
• Prepare for the bidding change. Manual max-CPL bidding and vertical-level Target CPA won't survive migration. Review your current setup now, understand what Google will convert it to, and check the resulting campaign-level bidding configuration immediately after cutover. Google says performance may take up to two weeks to stabilize.

None of this is complicated. All of it is time-sensitive, and the businesses that do it early will be far better positioned to diagnose and minimize disruption. Google itself says performance can take up to two weeks to ramp back to stable levels post-migration. The businesses that don't prepare will spend that window diagnosing problems they could have prevented.

There will be bugs

We'll say the quiet part: a migration of this size will ship with bugs. Every major Google launch does. Budget pacing oddities, sync issues, reporting gaps, edge cases nobody at Google predicted. First-wave accounts are, functionally, the test group.

That's where we're focusing right now. We manage accounts across every migration wave, which means we're seeing wave-one behavior in real time and identifying issues early, before they hit the later waves. Our Managed Partner Program status with Google gives us advance policy intelligence and a direct escalation path when something breaks, and we've built migration wave tracking into our internal monitoring dashboard so every account we touch has its wave, export status, and post-migration health watched daily.

Our advice, whether you work with us or not:

• If you have an LSA rep, talk to them now. Ask for your migration date, ask what's confirmed for your vertical, and ask what happens to your open cases at cutover.
• If you don't have a rep, or you want a second set of eyes, reach out through our website and we'll run a migration readiness audit on your account: your wave, your data risk, your budget conversion, and your bidding setup, so you know exactly where you stand before Google decides for you.

The migration is happening either way. The only variable is whether you cross it prepared.

Frequently asked questions

Is Local Services Ads going away?

The standalone LSA platform is being absorbed into Performance Max. The product itself, pay-per-lead ads for local service businesses, continues. The dashboard, reporting, and several controls change.

When will my LSA account migrate to Performance Max?

US home and storefront services began migrating in August 2026. Service area businesses follow in late 2026, and non-US accounts plus remaining categories, which we expect to include legal, in 2027. Expect these dates to slip, and prepare as if they won't.

Will I lose my LSA data in the migration?

Your campaign performance reports do not carry over, and dashboard access ends when your account migrates, so export your performance history before your wave. Your customer lead history, including contact details, message conversations, and older call recordings, does migrate into Lead Manager in Google Ads.

Does the Google Verified badge carry over to Performance Max?

Yes. Your verification status and badge survive the migration, along with pay-per-lead pricing, placements, and keywordless targeting.

What happens to my weekly budget?

It auto-converts to a daily budget. Daily systems pace spend differently than weekly ones, so verify the converted number and monitor spend closely in your first weeks post-migration.

Do I need to change my bidding before the migration?

If you're on manual bidding or vertical-level target CPA, both are deprecated. Review your setup now, understand what Google will convert it to, and verify the campaign-level bidding configuration right after cutover. Expect up to two weeks for performance to stabilize.