Hands-free mode

Hands-free is the Max tier feature that pays for the price gap between Pro and Max. The agent runs low-risk optimizations on its own, measures whether they actually helped, and rolls them back if they did not.

What hands-free does

On a 12-hour cadence, the agent diagnoses every campaign, builds recommendations, classifies each by blast radius (see Agent overview), and:

• Auto-executes the low-risk recommendations listed below, after a campaign's first 7 days.
• Queues large and legally-dicey recommendations for your approval.
• Inserts a real-time notification for every change.
• Sets a rollback deadline at T+7d (surgical) or T+14d (meaningful).
• Monitors metrics at T+24h and T+7d (plus T+14d for meaningful changes) and auto-rolls back on a worsened verdict.

What auto-executes

A change runs on its own only when it is low-risk in dollars (surgical, or meaningful with a track record) and is one a non-marketer would recognize. Surgical changes that auto-execute on Max with hands-free on:

• Block a search term that has spent money for 7 days with no conversion (exact-match negative)
• Keyword bid change of up to 30%
• Device, location or time-of-day bid modifier of up to 15%

Meaningful changes of the same kinds (larger bid modifiers, negatives that block more spend) auto-execute on Max only once the rule has a track record in your category: at least 8 decisive outcomes, with a cautious (Wilson 95% lower bound) success rate of 80% or more.

What still asks

These always require approval, even on Max with hands-free on:

• Any budget change
• Pausing keywords or ad groups
• Adding keywords, new ads or headline swaps
• Declaring a landing page A/B test winner
• Switching bidding strategy
• Pause an entire campaign
• Enable a paused campaign
• Budget shift over 20%
• Pause more than 5 keywords at once
• Device bid modifier over 30%
• Target CPA or Target ROAS change over 25%
• Change or delete a conversion action

Legally-dicey actions always require approval regardless of tier or blast radius: any action on restricted categories (locksmith, garage door), any action while Advertiser Identity Verification is pending.

Safety gates

For every potential auto-execute, the agent checks:

• Tier is Max
• User-level hands-free is enabled
• Per-campaign hands-free is enabled
• User circuit breaker is not tripped
• Rule circuit breaker for this (rule × category) is not tripped
• Global kill switch is not active
• Daily rate limit for this campaign is not exceeded
• Blast radius is surgical or meaningful
• For meaningful: the rule's cautious success rate in your category is 80% or more, from at least 8 decisive outcomes

If any gate fails, the recommendation queues for manual approval. You see the gating reason in the Optimize tab.

Rate limits

Hard cap: 5 hands-free auto-executions per campaign per day. Enforced via an atomic Postgres RPC. Once the limit is hit, subsequent recommendations that day surface for manual approval instead. The counter resets at midnight UTC.

This prevents runaway behavior from a bug or an unusually active day, and gives you a natural ceiling on how much the agent can change before you notice.

Circuit breakers

Three independent circuit breakers gate the system:

• Global kill switch. Ops-level. If we see something concerning across the fleet, we flip a flag in app_config and all hands-free execution stops immediately without a deploy.
• Rule-level breaker. When a specific rule (e.g. apply_geo_bid_modifier) drops under 40% success rate across at least 50 executions in a category, the rule is auto-downgraded to manual-only fleet-wide.
• User-level breaker. If a user has 3+ auto-rollbacks within a 30-day window, hands-free auto-disables on their account. They get an in-app notification with the reason. Turning it back on is not in the app yet; ask support.

Opting out

Per campaign: Campaign detail → Optimize tab → Hands-free toggle. Scope-off a specific campaign while keeping it on for everything else. The agent still generates recommendations for review. There is no account-wide switch in the app yet.