Local Services Ads Are Becoming Performance Max. Law Firms Move in 2027.

The largest structural change to Local Services Ads since the product launched is now underway, and most law firms have not been told about it because their category does not move until next year.

Google is migrating Local Services Ads into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. The standalone Local Services dashboard goes away (Google Ads Help).

The calendar

August 2026: migration begins for selected United States home and storefront service categories: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving.

Late 2026: service-area businesses without a storefront, and accounts with custom configurations.

2027: non-US accounts and all remaining categories. Legal sits here.

Account administrators receive an email fourteen days before their migration date, with reminders in the existing dashboard.

What actually changes

Management moves. Leads, budgets and reporting live inside Google Ads. The Local Services dashboard your team learned is retired.

Budgets convert. Weekly budgets become daily averages, calculated by dividing the historical average weekly budget by seven. The monthly ceiling becomes the daily average multiplied by 30.4.

Manual bidding is deprecated. Max-per-lead goes away. Per-vertical target CPA is replaced by a single campaign-level CPA, which matters for firms currently setting different targets for, say, estate planning and personal injury.

Leads relocate. Historical leads transfer to the Google Ads Leads page.

Reporting does not migrate. This is the one to act on early. Previous performance data does not come across. If you want year-over-year comparisons after the switch, somebody has to export them before it.

What does not change

The charging model survives: you still pay per lead rather than per click. Placement stays on Google Search and Google Maps. Targeting stays keywordless, driven by service categories and service areas rather than keyword lists. The reach of the format is intended to be the same.

So this is not the product being discontinued. It is the product being rehoused, with the controls rebuilt in the process.

Why a law firm should care in 2026

Legal does not migrate until 2027, which makes it tempting to file this under “next year’s problem.” Two reasons not to.

First, the export. The one irreversible loss in this migration is historical reporting, and the window to prevent it closes the day your account moves. That is a fifteen-minute task with a hard deadline, and the deadline arrives with fourteen days notice.

Second, and more interesting, the beta is running in public right now. From August 2026, thousands of home services accounts are operating under exactly the model legal will inherit. Every behaviour of pay-per-lead Performance Max, how the campaign-level CPA behaves, what happens to lead quality, how the budget conversion plays out in practice, is observable for a full year before your firm is affected.

A partner already operating migrated accounts in other verticals walks into the legal migration with a playbook. A partner who only knows the old dashboard walks in on day one having lost both their reporting history and their bidding approach at the same time.

What we are doing about it

For every Local Services account we manage:

• Full historical export, taken now and refreshed quarterly, so the data exists independently of Google’s interface.
• Budget modelling in both shapes, so the weekly-to-daily conversion holds no surprises.
• A bidding plan that does not depend on manual max-per-lead surviving, because it will not.
• Active monitoring of the home services migration through 2026, so the lessons are learned on somebody else’s account.
• A migration readiness check on every account before the fourteen-day notice lands, rather than after.

None of this is urgent in the sense of this week. It is urgent in the sense that the cost of ignoring it is paid all at once, on a date you do not choose.

If your firm runs Local Services Ads and nobody has mentioned this to you, that is worth noticing on its own. Talk to us about migration readiness, or read what managed Local Services Ads covers.

Sources

Every claim above comes from Google’s own documentation. These are the pages it came from, so you can check any of it yourself, or send it to whoever else needs convincing.

• Google Ads Help: Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max
• Local Services Help: how bidding works today
• Local Services Help: how leads work