With DSA, Google crawls the pages you target — your whole site, specific categories, or a page feed — and matches them to relevant searches. It writes a headline based on the search and the page, while you supply the descriptions. DSA is useful for large sites with many products or services, and for discovering valuable search terms that a keyword list doesn't cover.
Because targeting is based on site content, DSA needs guardrails: exclude pages like careers, blog posts, and login screens, add negative keywords, and review search terms regularly. Google's newer AI Max for Search campaigns builds on the same keywordless approach, and Google has been steering advertisers in that direction.
Example
An e-commerce site with 3,000 products uses DSA targeting its category pages to capture long-tail searches that would be impossible to cover with individual keywords.
How Sloss Digital uses it
We use DSA (and increasingly AI Max) as a discovery layer — harvesting the profitable search terms it finds into tightly managed keyword campaigns.